Tony Williams' first collection of poetry The Corner of Arundel Lane and Charles Street (Salt, 2009) was shortlisted for the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and the Portico Prize. A book of short stories is forthcoming from Salt in 2012. He works as a lecturer in creative writing at Northumbria University. His pamphlet, All the Rooms of Uncle's Head was published by Nine Arches Press in 2011 and was awarded the Poetry Book Society Autumn Pamphlet Choice.
All the Rooms of Uncle's Head reviewed:
Nine Arches: All the Rooms of Uncle’s Head combines ideas about outsider art and questions about sanity and madness, as well as representing themes of freedom and incarceration both in the form and content of the poems. Could you please tell us a little more about the pretext and the concept behind the collection and what initially inspired these ‘broken tile’ poems?
Tony Williams: What inspired them was my discovery of outsider art, and in particular of the great body of art produced by inmates of mental asylums around the beginning of the twentieth century. As I understand it, there was a period when such people were beginning to be allowed to do art (the beginning of the art therapy movement, for one thing), and this coincided with the art world’s interest in primitivism, so there was this flowering when work as being produced and some of it was getting serious attention. Because of the nature of their illnesses – and, one suspects, their circumstances – the art they produced tended to have certain features. In general terms, they weren’t trained artists – insiders in that sense; and I think it’s also pertinent to say that many of them weren’t social insiders either. So the work they produced might not do what we normally expect art to do, or might do it in a surprising way. There’s a lot of bathos, of naffness, but in the best cases it’s delivered with such zeal and conviction that it transcends those judgements and enters another sphere, where the viewer seems to have crossed into a parallel universe with another artistic tradition. More specifically, there’s a lot of schematic work, use of text alongside images, idiosyncratic and convoluted visions, and a horror of white space – if the space is there, you have to fill it. There’s an amazing, strange beauty about some of the work, and a tremendous sadness too. You can find examples by googling ‘Outsider art’ or ‘Hans Prinzhorn’, who was the major figure in recognising and cataloguing the artwork of the mentally ill. In book form, Colin Rhodes’ Outsider Art: Spontaneous Alternatives is a good place to start.
It was the sense of moving outside tradition into a strange alternative that fascinated me, I think. It isn’t that these artists were consciously experimental or original – there’s a lot of childishness and trying to be traditional, it’s just that they don’t get it quite right. And yet the results do appear to speak of human experience, as if tradition has been rewired so that bathos does the job of pathos. I started to wonder what an equivalent poetry might be, that looked longingly at tradition but didn’t understand it, and had a go anyway. In many ways I’ve always been a traditional poet not necessarily in the sense of being stylistically conservative, but in being conscious of literary traditions and learning from them in a rather deliberate way. So it seemed a useful exercise to try to write in ways which cut against that tendency.
That was the motivation; I’m not quite sure how the tiles evolved from that. But I knew that the main text would not be enough, that the voice I was imagining wouldn’t be able to resist adding commentary to amplify and add to the poems themselves (filling the page, again), so that’s where the marginalia came from. I think from there I started to wonder what the texts would be written on – pages in a book seemed too dull – and somehow I came to these ceramic tiles. Maybe he tiles his room with them, or chucks them at jackdaws. Eventually that led me to the cover story where these fragments of tile have been found in a basement, and I’ve come along and put some of them back together. That’s suggestive in various useful ways.
The poems capture the voice of their narrator both powerfully and respectfully. To write both about mental illness, and in the voice of someone who is mentally ill, raises issues of authority and the necessity to avoid parody or exploitation. There is also an interesting power in giving a voice to the powerless, which I imagine has to be carefully balanced. How did you successfully navigate these concerns?
Yes, I was nervous about this whenever I thought about publishing the texts – but not in the writing. I think I was fairly clear in my own head that I was doing this absolutely respectfully, not as a pastiche or a parody but really to learn from these artists as artists (‘What do they do? What can I do that’s analogous?). Of course I’m not an inmate, and I’m not an outsider – I do on the whole know what I’m doing when I write a poem. But looking at these pieces which mentally ill people had produced seemed to loosen something in my head, giving me glimpses of an imagery which connected with an obscure area of memory and experience, and I wanted to know if I could develop a writing technique which enabled me to reach that experience for myself. In the event, of course, the answer is mainly No – but I was able to move towards it, getting more glimpses. What began as a kind of ventriloquism, taking on somebody’s else’s voice – which I think is ultimately the dangerous thing you refer to – actually did develop into a way of approaching my own experience, albeit in a fictionalised and highly changed way.
When the pamphlet was coming up for publication, I did get nervous, and anticipated that, if it did get reviews, there would be some who disapproved of the project on grounds of exploitation. So far, though, I’ve been lucky; people haven’t challenged it on an ethical basis, so hopefully that means I did it in a suitably respectful way. The way I look at it is that I’m trying to learn from some wonderful artworks, which seems to me a defensible relationship to strike with the artists that produced them
Why did you decide on the use of the sonnet or ‘broken’ sonnet form for these poems?
That was easy – so much of the art that inspired me is highly formalised or schematic, with calendars, diagrams, labels, etc. It’s very symmetrical and often clearly intended to illustrate a world-view or allegorise or ‘mean’ something, however disastrously it fails to achieve this intention. So I felt that an overtly formal poetry would be the literary equivalent. These texts are supposedly being written at the high modernist moment, but of course they completely ignore it. What could be more attractive to someone attempting to communicate a fixed, elaborate world-view than the sonnet?
Do you regard All the Rooms of Uncle’s Head as a poem-sequence or not?
Well, in an obvious way the answer is yes. Certainly each tile has a poem at the heart of it, however you define the marginalia and the graphical presentation as something inside or outside that. And in pamphlet form – well, Nine Arches is a poetry publisher, and I write poetry, so it must be that, right?
On the other hand, it’s lovely to think of the tiles not quite fitting generic definitions. I was continually hoping to not quite write poems, so it’s apt if the result is not quite a poem sequence. And I do have this pipe dream of producing an edition which is actually printed on ceramic tiles, which are then smashed. You could put them back together and frame them, or just put all the pieces in a tea chest and let people rummage through. Art-house literary Lego. In that form of course it would be more like fine art, and the read–viewer’s experience would be very different. If anyone’s got a couple of grand to spare to pay for printing the tiles, do get in touch!
And, taking that back to the idea of the sequence, although we did think a lot about the best order to print the tiles (and I’m grateful to Nine Arches for your help with this – actually the order is mainly yours, not mine), actually the fiction says that the fragments were discovered mixed up – so any order we present them in is imposed afterwards, not by the original creator. Maybe it makes more sense to think of it as a series, rather than a sequence.
The poems themselves in All the Rooms of Uncle’s Head are beautifully designed and intricately laid out; they have an innate physicality and presence about them. You are a graphic designer as well as a poet – so is it something you’ve wanted to combine and experiment with for a while? And do you think is there enough attention to the visual aspects and layout of poems in contemporary poetry?
Thank you. I do, or did, some graphic design work over the years, although I was never formally trained. My dad was a graphic designer, so he showed me stuff and then I learned on the job. And when we were bored as children my mum would say, ‘Read a book. Write a book. Paint a picture.’ So yes, the impulse to do something was always there. Apart from anything else, it’s nice to make nice things, and hold them in your hands. Doing the tiles was a completely playful thing, going back to those childhood activities. I was supposed to be doing a PhD, so what could be more fun than to mess about with Adobe Illustrator and InDesign on these preposterous tiles? (I put them into the PhD submission, but neither of the examiners liked them.) Obviously when it came to the publishing it was important what the end result looked like – I’m very happy with it turned out, and very grateful to Nine Arches for the work you put in to making it look and feel right.
As for attention to the visual in contemporary poetry – sometimes. There are some wonderful productions from people like Nine Arches and Salt, my other publisher (I’m very lucky in that regard), Donut, and so on. I do like the austere Faber tradition, although I may be in a minority. It is personal. I remember loving Etruscan’s production of Tom Leonard’s Intimate Voices, but loathing the look and feel of his Voices in the Silence. Some poetry publishers, who I had better not name, have house style which I find appalling – and not just among the smaller presses. But you know – I may have been a professional designer, but I was never an expert, so no one should listen to me.
As we’ve mentioned, the poems are presented upon the page. They also present the reader with a combination of challenges and choices in terms of how they approach and read them – with text running around the sides and alongside the poems, cracks across the text and so on. Did you have to balance the aesthetics and readability carefully? And how do you choose to read them?
Yes, I don’t quite know how the poems would be read. Do you start with the main text and then look at the rest for afters, or do it the other way round? Mix together the marginalia and the rest of it? I don’t know – not my problem, and actually I hope part of the fun, making the reader think about what they’re doing. In that respect at least it’s more like a piece of art, in that it’s just there and you can choose to look at it how you like. It escapes the tyranny of the page. Of course I do have to tackle the same problem when I read from the tiles – do I read out all the marginalia, or just the main poem, or what? I haven’t quite solved that one yet; I tend to read the main text, but it feels as if more could be done in performance to help the tiles reach their potential. I think though that it’s in performance that the project could start to become disrespectful – if I play a mentally ill person, that feels much more problematic.
With the cracks, I was rather conservative – there are very few places where much of the main text is invisible, so you have to work sometimes but there are no tiles where you just have half the poem and you have to imagine the rest of it. Steven Waling took me to task for that in his review, saying that more gaps would have been good, and I think perhaps he’s right. The premise is that the tiles only exist as fragments, so maybe some of them should be less complete. At the same time, the idea is that this is a selection of the tiles, so by implication there are gaps in between the tiles – whole tiles missing.
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