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Id:
The Method Men was published in May 2010. How's that working out for you?
Briggs: Okay, I guess. The launch readings have gone well. I've sold a goodly
number of copies at readings. And it's been shortlisted for the London Fringe
New Poetry Award. Reviewers, thus far, have been kind, and (generally)
perceptive. Best of all, I'm still enjoying reading the poems to audiences,
even though I've been living with these method men quite a few years now.
Superego: As you say, it's been a few years. Some of these poems were first
published in magazines six or seven years ago. One or two were in your Eric
Gregory Award submission eight years back. Don't you think you ought to be
concentrating on new work, rather than dissecting the guts of The Method
Men in
this spurious interview?
Briggs: Er, perhaps, but I think the book benefited from taking its time.
There's a coherence there I'm really pleased with. All the characters in the
poems seem restricted, in the sense that they're trying to navigate an
ineffable world by means of tried-and-tested, yet Id:iosyncratic, mental
tricks and routines; styles of thought that began, perhaps, as habit and have
hardened into something like character.
Id: Illustrate!
Briggs: Well, those in the title poem, for example, reliant as they are on
styles of divination (some genuine, some fictitious) present the most obvious
examples, but the same limitation, the same reliance on method, can be found
everywhere in the book if you go looking for it. The protagonists of
'AccId:ent' and 'Exemplum' seem to have come to the limit of their
capacities, to be in the process, almost, of acknowledging that events have
shoved them into realms of experience for which they have no mental compass: their
methods are stretched to breaking-point. Others, the speakers of 'Pulse' and
'Bloomsday' seem to have found a way through to a new paradigm; or, at least,
to have realised the need to discard the old one. Hence the flicked cigarette
at the end of 'Bloomsday' and the oblivion at the end of 'Pulse' are not so
much endings as the possibility of new beginnings. I think the context
suggests that anyway. Those method men capable of love seem to fare better,
as in 'Woodland, with Two Figures'. Somehow, they acquire greater mental
elasticity. Those of more rigId: thought-habit, like those in 'Closed
Systems' and 'Clowns', end their respective poems in a more hapless state.
Superego: Julia Bird describes the character in 'Closed Systems' as having
Òall the personality of a weather frontÓ. Would you care to comment on that?
Briggs: Well, she's about right. The poem started with one of those
walk-and-text pieces that the artist Richard Long produced about ten to
twenty years ago Ð the Id:ea of transplanting water stream to river to
estuary from the east to the west coast of England. But we see that this
character has been conducting experiments like this since he was a boy, and
that the water-transplant of the poem's continuous present simply leads him
back into memory Ð his father, his childhood Ð rather than into any new
observations. So all that water seems less a symbol of fertility, more a kind
of drowning. It's circular, like the water-cycle; a closed system in which
he's stuck, despite his carefully-calibrated attempts to measure it.
Id: There's a lot of digging about in the depths of memory and childhood in
the book. I like that. But how much of it's autobiographical?
Briggs: Yes, there is a lot of that. Especially in the mId:dle of the book.
The 'High Summer É' poems, and, to an extent, the album sonnets engage in
that kind of thing. A lot of the details are loosely autobiographical: the
Johnny Thunders poem, Rod Stewart, Nick Cave, DavId: Sylvian, etc. all have a
basis in my own history. I think that sequence is where I'm most naked. But
they all branch out from personal navel-gazing, I hope. I'm more interested
in poetry as the telling of fabulous lies, Borgesian fictions, or of how
things might be, than in recording the banality of my own trials and tribulations.
Superego: In terms of form, it's clear that you're interested in traditional
lyric forms, but also, here and there, in something freer, more experimental.
Do you think those two sit uneasily together?
Briggs: No. I'm happy with the range of styles and forms. The sonnet sequence
is about as traditional as you can get, but even there I've gone for a
longer, looser line than the traditional pentameter. The more constructivist
pieces, 'My Year of Culture' and 'Cultural Static' were written to rules I'd
set myself involving the repetition of patterns, but even there I've broken
the rules in the interest of the poem. 'Cultural Static' began as a hebdomad
(a form developed by Roddy Lumsden), but I've truncated mine as I think it
works better that way. Even 'Bloomsday', the closest I come to
stream-of-consciousness in the book, had a guId:ing principle. I'd read Derek
Walcott talking about how he finds the rhythm or metre of a poem in the first
line-and-a-half, then rId:es that beat for the rest of the process of
composition. I certainly worked that way in 'Bloomsday', and elsewhere.
Although I've discovered that what seems a very clear rhythmic signature to
my ear may sound completely different to someone else. Mostly, it's simply a
case of chiselling away at what you've got until the form emerges.
Id: You seem to have ordered the poems in a very deliberate way. Don't you
think it might have worked better had it been more chaotic, more of a
rag-bag?
Briggs: No. I like the sequence. It creates echoes and counterpoint as you
move recto/verso from one poem to the next. Sometimes you'll get a little
sequence, say of graveyard poems that end 'On the Banks of Acheron'. Other
times you'll get a poem that sets what came before in a different light, as
when 'Closed Systems' is followed by 'Drought', or 'Winter Music' by 'Snow'.
Superego: I suggest it's your turn to cook this evening. Shall we conclude
there?
Id: What're we having?
Briggs: Risotto.
© David
Briggs 2010
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