MIKE WOODS AND CARL HOMER INTERVIEW DISTINGUISHED POET AND ARVON FOUNDATION CREATOR JOHN FAIRFAX.

John Fairfax created the Arvon Foundation with John Moat in 1969, to give writers the opportunity to teach their trade to aspirants of all backgrounds and interests in secluded rural settings (farmhouses in Totleigh Barton in Devon and Lumb Bank in Yorkshire). Many well-known poets began their writing on an Arvon course, and the scheme has attracted universal support and approbation. Ted Hughes, who has been very active on Arvon's behalf, introduces Fairfax and Moat's essential "The Way To Write" (Elm Tree, 1981). Fairfax' books of poetry include "This I Say", "The 5th Horseman of the Apocalypse", "Adrift on the Star Brow of Taliesin", "The Wild Children", "Space Poems", "Bone Harvest Done" and "100 Poems".

PROGRESSION: Which poets, either those you've read or those you've met, have made the biggest impression on you?
FAIRFAX: Marvell means a great deal to me. And Coleridge... Coleridge was a great influence. I've met an awful lot of contemporary poets as well, of course. The thing is, poetry is rather like Arctic exploring: you really have to help each other or you're lost. The very first reading I ever gave... professional or serious reading... was in London. I was still a kid at school, and came up from the sticks, not even really shaving... maybe I was about seventeen. It was with Dylan Thomas and Rex Warner - they were the two main readers, and I was to meet them in The Catherine Wheel in Kensington High Street. I got there and there were these two guys standing there - Rex Warner was tall and scholarly-looking, and Dylan Thomas looking like a Welsh reprobate - and in between them was a pint of beer and a whiskey. Dylan just said "you'll read between us"... so that people didn't just get up and leave! It was actually very thoughtful. He told me that the great secret about reading is to read slower than you can think.
PROGRESSION: Carol Ann Duffy said, perhaps rather polemically, that the only place that modern poetry has left to go is up it's own arse. How do you respond to that?
FAIRFAX: (laughing) I think modern poetry has got a long, long way to go. As long as there's language, as long as people actually speak together, communicate, be it on the internet or whatever, there'll still be poets around. I mean, language is actually a very progresive thing; it seems to me that the language is progressing at a tremendous speed. I'm all for slang and that kind of thing, because it keeps the language going, enlivens it. And there's so much stuff on TV that sounds good linguistically, like Blackadder, or that's imaginative, like The X Files. And by god, they're very popular programs. I've heard these concerns about this alleged impoverishment of English by laissez-faire use of grammar and so on, I've heard it all before. It goes back and back and back. People, particularly academics... it would end up like the Academie Francaise, absolute language police. If we didn't incorporate words from other countries, which we do... we seem to annex them very easily... even, heaven forfend, from Australia!
PROGRESSION: On the technical front, is there any writing advice you can pass on? For example, how to decide where to break lines in free verse.
FAIRFAX: Free verse is very hard. I find the two things that operate on it are the poet's ear, and the eye. Like a paragraph in a novel, the eye and syntacical meaning will do it - you don't run the meanings into each other; you seperate them. That's where the shape of the poem comes from. There are no tablets of stone, of course. A good way to move away from free verse is to use a syllabic count. That brings a discipline, and a very good one too.
PROGRESSION: What would you advocate in that respect?
FAIRFAX: What I do is to write out the ideas, check the lines I think are meaningful to find the one I think best says what I want in the right words, and count the syllables in that one. Then find another line, count that... and make a structure out of the result. It's really simple but it leads to other things - I mean, Emily Dickinson, Marian Moore - great exponents of the syllabic count. The sonnet is much underrated these days. Each poet has a different ear, thank god, though. So however you break lines, it'll sound fresh to other people.
PROGRESSION: Tell us a bit about how you work.
FAIRFAX: I work in a notebook at first, in longhand. After redrafting it goes on to the typewriter where more redrafting goes through. Two to four times, probably. Then when I think I've got it more or less right, I read the thing onto a tape recorder. Then I put the poem and the tape away in a drawer for a week or two. Then I take them out, play the tape and follow the reading on the page. If I find I've snagged somewhere, I check it wasn't just my tongue slipping over itself, try it again... otherwise the line probably doesn't scan correctly. But equally, different physical voices and dialects can make a great difference to read English. Reading with Maurice Riorden and Eva Saltzman, Cork and New York, I noticed the wonderful difference. And the production of my "Space Poems" read by two American actors (to be previewed at the Smithsonian Institute soon). So I don't think one can or should be prescriptive.
PROGRESSION: How do you feel about the factionalism in poetry these days?
FAIRFAX: Like the Armitage/MacMillan school, the Huddersfield lot, the London mafia? In London, it's always been thus; I think it's nuts. Literary squabblers. It's not a deliberate thing. The Late Poets... they just happened to be buddies. I mean, is there, in ten or twenty years' time, when John Moat and I have fallen off the perch, going to be the Arvon mafia? Ted, Mike Baldwin, Alan Brownjohn and I? You get people with tremendous reputations when they're around, and ten years later... maybe they come back, who knows? I think there's been a resurgence in the interest in poetry, though, because of the communications revolution. That can only be a good thing.