In Conversation with Oliver Fiore: Part I

You can read Oliver’s poetry here.

SYLVIE: I keep thinking, what if I just throw a really rogue one out there?

OLIVER: Throw a really rogue one out there!

SL: So, Ollie. First question. Where did it all go wrong?

OF: When I was seven… (laughs)

SL: …my parents divorced…

OF: Oh no, they’re together. Just.

SL: That’s the problem.

OF: (laughs) Yeah.

OF: Come on, throw me a really random one to start.

SL: Should I just pick one from the list?

OF: Yeah. This is no longer chronological order, this is —

SL: We’re in the wilderness.

OF: This is episodic.

SL: Temporality has been collapsed.

(both laugh)

SL: Okay, tell me if you have any particular writing habits, routines, or cheeky little rituals?

OF: I really don’t. I used to… So, lockdown was jarring for me. As it was for everyone. And one of the effects it had on me was that, despite the fact that I was indoors every day, and had the time to journal every day, I stopped journaling every day. And whenever I would journal, I would try and jot something down. Even if it wasn’t something like a poem, or even if I didn’t have the impetus to write, I would jot something down — just a couple of lines at some point in the day. So that would be my routine, my habit. I’d journal some lines, maybe a poem, if I was feeling like it. But now it’s more like, whenever the chaotic will comes over me. The last poem I wrote was obviously to a deadline.

SL: Do you find that waiting for a deadline often interferes with waiting for inspiration to strike? As in, do you think you can write sort of mechanically, and set yourself to be inspired?

OF: I supposed I’ve got two different kinds of inspirations. There’s those really pretentious, high romantic, sublimating inspirations, like when I’m outside and I see a sunset. That’s an inspiration. And there’s also those latent things, like when I use writing to process something going on in my life, it’s those latent things that I’m trying to process that then become inspirations. So I’ve got those two things going on. There’s spontaneous bits of inspiration, that just come from daily life, and being outside, and being pretentious, and then I’ve got those more abstract forms of inspiration. Like a thing that happened.

SL: Also, I just noticed that my brain was going in different directions when you talked about journaling, because the word journal no longer means journal to me.

OF: Now that it’s Enigma, it’s something else completely.

SL: It means Sylvie (Journal).

OF: It means Sylvie (Journal). You are exclusively Sylvie (Journal).

SL: Yes.

Context: Sylvie is listed in Ollie’s contacts as Sylvie (Journal).

SL: What is it that draws you to poetry rather than other creative forms? As opposed to, say, prose.

OF: I have a really short attention span.

(both laugh)

OF: That’s one of them. I have a really short attention span. And whenever I’ve tried to write prose, it’s been so dense. It’s been so purple; it’s been purple prose. It’s been so full of stuff that means it might as well be poetry. And I like the idea of musicality, and you don’t get that as much in prose. Although, you know, a good sentence is a good sentence, and it’s beautiful regardless. That’s because I can’t do actual music. I have no musical talent, because my parents didn’t let me play violin when I was ten—

SL: This is where it all comes from…

OF: It is where it all comes from. I suppose I’m trying to channel all those musical things. Also, the succinctness of poetry, where I can express something — one of my favourite poems I’ve ever written is, like, six lines, and twenty words long, or something like that. And if I were to write that in prose, that might be a book. Or a very long short story. Or a novella. So yeah, it’s the inherent musicality of poetry, and its ability to not take up too much of my time. And I don’t have to think about it for a long time as well. I can write it and come back and dwell on it, which I think is what poetry is anyway. It’s that return, when you write or read something, and it means something, and you come back, and you can either experience that again in a different way, or it starts to mean something else, you know?

SL: Could you tell me about the thought and writing process behind your poem “in june”?

OF: So, this is a semi-biographical piece, I suppose (laughs). I have always been fascinated with birds, which I guess is answering another one of your questions preemptively. I’ve always been interested in birds, since I was eleven, maybe. I got a book out of my school library about birdwatching, and my grandmother was a birdwatcher, and so I started doing that then. And I have a relatively extensive knowledge of the British ornithological scene (laughs). But yeah, jumping forward in time, when I was sixteen or seventeen, maybe, we had this purple tree in the garden — a sambucus tree — and some blackbirds had made a nest in there. I was super excited about it. There’s a video on my mum’s phone of me finding them, and being really — and bear in mind that I’m sixteen or seventeen here, like I’m a grown child—

(Sylvie laughs)

OF: …being super excited to see these blue eggs. I literally squealed. It’s really dramatic.

SL: In my head, you’re like, five.

OF: I had the demeanour of a five-year-old at that point. So the tragedy that then unfolds is that once these birds had hatched, maybe a few days later, it was really early in the morning; I was getting up to go to school. There was lots of noise outside this tree. And my bedroom was downstairs, on the other side of the wall where the tree was, so I could kind of hear jarring noises — pained tweets, if you will. I went to go to school, and we saw the magpie fly over, and when we went and looked after I came back from school, all the baby blackbirds had died.

SL: Sorry, I love the phrase ‘painted tweets’. But as you were.

OF: Most of twitter is just pained tweets.

SL: Very true.

OF: So, that’s where that poem comes from. And I was doing a creative writing module last year, and I found myself gravitating towards nature writing. And I asked myself — what’s going to be really impactful and colourful? I was writing a lot about vivid colour at the time, which I love. I just love colour. And so its a marrying of that aesthetic intensity and this jarring tragedy. I don’t like using the word tragedy, because they’re birds, and it’s a humanising word, but it had the tragic tropes, to me.

SL: I am a fan of the use of colour in your poetry. And I think you manage to go for — I like odd specificity, I like detail—

OF: That’s what I like about your poetry!

SL: Thank you! I am cautious not to say that something’s just red or blue; I want to say something that’s a little more real than that. Because in my head nothing is just red or just blue. It has to be more odd. And therefore more real, somehow. I’ve always really liked the phrase (from “in june”): ‘blind yet to this most silent world’, just because of those senses that don’t quite align and yet that makes perfect sense in that moment.

OF: Funnily enough, that was an edit. So, I had originally — so, instead of ‘silent,’ I had the world ‘ultraviolent’ in there, because obviously ultraviolence can be a pun on ultraviolet, and you know, then it’s ultra-violent—

SL: Lana Del Rey. She’s there too.

(both laugh)

OF: Yeah. She’s there. And I don’t listen to Lana Del Rey, but someone had played Ultraviolence, and I was like: Huh. That’s pretty cool! (laughs)

SL: (laughs) She really went off there.

OF: She really went off there. So yeah, ultraviolence. It was originally ‘to this most ultraviolent world’ or something like that, and Andy Brown, the module leader at the time, he was like: ‘Nah, change it. You’ve already got that in there. So I put silent, and I think it kind of works a lot better than ultraviolent. It does invoke that — jarring, not… What’s a pretty way of saying jarring? — it’s unsettling, I suppose, isn’t it?

SL: Next, could you tell me about your thought process and writing process behind your poem “17:58 E.S.D to B.T.M”?

OF: This is another semi-biographical (laughs)... No, so I was travelling up to Bristol, on the train to see my friend, and I was looking out the window. I was try to get a window seat on the train, because there’s a better chance to see the Devon and Somerset countrysides. And we were going past a section of the motorway, and there was a kestrel hovering there above the pines… and I was like oh, that’s really cool, because I love kestrels. But also it was sad, because that’s where most kestrel fatalities happen — when they go and grab something from the roadside, and they get hit by a car. And I wanted to capture that; I suppose it’s like a tragic fall. The high-highs above the pines and the messy mass of feathers on the roadside. I wrote that one pretty quickly, actually. It went through a couple of small edits, but that’s definitely one of my favourite poems. There’s a bit where it says ‘achieve-of’, there’s another one as well, and they’re Gerard Manley Hopkins references. I just love the poem “The Windhover” — that’s the other reference, I use the word ‘windhover’. I think that it’s got such a creative use of language, and I wanted to pay homage to that, and allude to it as much as I could. I don’t think there’s any greater kestrel poem in the English language than “The Windhover”.

SL: Something I have wanted to ask about this poem as well, is just about the capitalisation on Still and Stillness. I was wondering why it was that that word has a different sort of importance.

OF: I suppose it’s to establish a juxtaposition. Because the kestrel in all of its — one of its best-known states is when it’s still, when it’s hovering. It’s like this transcendent figure that can just decide that movement’s not for it. It’s like it’s staying still in the air and it’s so unusual. And then juxtaposing this image of this otherworldly grandness, I suppose, with the stillness of death. So that juxtaposition draws attention to it, because stillness — it’s like, stasis is implied movement of the bird.

SL: I also feel it just lends itself nicely to the idea of capturing something. As in, in a writerly sense. I like that it starts with ‘Hold’, and then the last line ends with ‘Still’, so when I look at the poem I see ‘hold still’, and I feel like a lot of writing that I like… So, one of the main reasons I love Woolf is because I feel like she’s trying to hold people still; there’s a kind of desperate need to take a photograph of somebody — to say to them, ‘stay a little longer,’ even wordlessly. 

OF: No, I love that.

SL: And I kind of feel like that’s what you’re doing here, in a poetic sense.

OF: Thank you. I think, again, something I haven’t touched on in poetry that draws me to it is the capturing of the moment. I write pretty much exclusively lyric poetry, as in poetry that doesn’t necessarily need a narrative, because the moment is such a — you don’t have to obey time in a moment. And whilst a moment’s always surrounded by time, it doesn’t always have to obey it. I think the most beautiful things we have are those snapshots. Like with Woolf, and that holding. It’s like staying still. So I suppose this poem is really a poem about why I like writing poetry.

SL: Moments are surrounded by time but they don’t have to obey it. I like that. I’m going to keep that in my head. I suppose that’s why I come back to modernist literature, because I think there is something nice about rejecting the narrativisation of everything when you prioritise the moment. Definitely when I’ve been writing poetry recently — and I do write longer poems — I don’t… I perhaps used to, but I don’t really write narrative poetry anymore; it’s often more a sort of list of moments that kind of follow each other. It just feels like there’s more that you can do; there’s more that you can push past or blur.

OF: Oh, 100%. Time is but a construct, you know?

SL: (laughs) Yeah.

OF: It’s really weird, because most of my interests academically tend to be really Victorian, but I don’t write Victorian poetry.

SL: I’m waiting for you to write a three-volume novel.

OF: (laughs) I’ll write my own Aurora Leigh. Hm. Oliver Barrett Browning.

(both laugh)

SL: When I went to this English Soc Literary Dress Up thing…

OF: Did you go as Flush?

(both laugh)

Context: Flush was Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel.

SL: No, I went as Medusa. So there was a girl there, who was talking about how at her school — it had some link or other to the Brownings. I think they got married near there, in the church near the school or something. And their school houses were named after them I think? And I was so excited about it, it was embarrassing.

(Ollie laughs)

SL: It was a physical strain not to tell her everything about my dissertation.

OF: That’s what you should’ve done! That’s good public research.

SL: I know, like, can I visit? I can’t remember where it was, but please! Let me in!... I might go into the bird question now.

OF: Go ahead.

SL: I’m looking at it as if I need to know what it says. My notes literally just say ‘Birds! They come up in your poems a lot. A groovy motif. Tell me why!’

OF: (laughs) Again, so there’s the one element that they’ve just been important to me for so long; they mean something to me personally outside of those normal links to, say, freedom or spirituality. I like birds because they’re both here and they’re there; not to get too academic and pretentious—

SL: Yeah, I feel like this is a sentence I liked when I read your essay.

OF: (laughs) This is linking directly to the essay I just wrote. They’re kind of — they figure a liminal; they can kind of exist both… Like, when they’re perched and they’re nested, they’re here. They’re tangible, you know, they have a physicality, but there’s something spectacular and out of this world when you see a bird flying. There’s something that’s just so, like… like, we can’t do that. It’s not here anymore, it’s there. Obviously, that’s where the freedom and liberty and all those associations come from, but they can kind of be both. Like in the kestrel poem, they’re both here and there. So yeah, that’s why I come back to them. I read a lot of Romantic era poems, and they come up a lot in Romantic era poems, but yeah, it’s that really… that being and not — and being better than us — that really draws me back to birds. And they’re really pretty (laughs).

SL: (laughs) They are really pretty. And that’s a valid reason to write about something. That makes me think of something that comes up on the collection of bird poems I got you for your birthday. It comes up on the back of it; it says something like: ‘there’s no animal that we turn to more in poetry,’ and I think that’s true! I guess beyond the obvious associations of freedom, I haven’t really thought as much as I should have, about why we turn to birds—

OF: Yeah, I think there’s such a… Obviously, if you explore any metaphor enough, there becomes a multiplicity of reasons why it’s important, but I think birds, above all, have so many different associations to us. But the bird itself, I think, if you dig down, there’s so much more. They’re about aspiration; they’re about going beyond. I think it’s so interesting that they come up so much, because it’s such an obvious — it’s like a will to power, almost. It’s like, if I write that I’m a bird enough, maybe I will become one. 

(both laugh)

SL: She loved birds so much she became one…

OF: There’s a Felicia Dorothea Hemans poem called “The Nightingale’s Death Song”, which is from the perspective of a nightingale. It’s just like — she wants to be the bird, you know? There’s this capacity to go and do anything because you’re not tied to the ground; you’re not tied to a place. To get academic — to get philosophical — you are free from biopower; you exist outside of politics. That’s another thing, they are apolitical — except for maybe eagles—

SL: Unless you think the birds work for the bourgeoisie.

OF: That’s true. Unless you think birds aren’t real…

(both laugh)

OF: …and they work for the government—

SL: —government spies.

(Sylvie goes on an unnecessary tangent about birds in Virginia Woolf’s prose)

OF: I need to read more modernist literature. I do love modernist literature, but I just haven’t read that much. I’ve almost only read Woolf and E. M. Forster.

SL: I love Forster!

OF: I love Forster; he’s such a cute twink.

SL: (laughs) Charis likes Forster; we talked about him in our interview too.

OF: He’s so good. Maurice is just top tier.

SL: Yeah, that and Howard’s End are my favourite Forster novels.

OF: I love Howard’s End. I didn’t realise there was a film?

SL: There’s an Emma Thompson one that I haven’t seen, and a BBC televised version that I have seen.

OF: Shall we do a screening? (laughs)

SL: (laughs) Absolutely. New society event. We’ll be the only people who turn up — just (rubs palms together) so fucking excited for Howard’s End.

OF: (laughs) I read a lot of Howard’s End on this really, definitely Soviet-era train in Croatia when I was interrailing. It was interesting, reading all of these descriptions of damp, cold London while I was sweating on a train. It was really contradictory. 

SL: How do you think your writing has changed and developed from first year to third year? I was thinking in particular of your poem “bronze” as an earlier poem of yours—

OF: I think “bronze” is actually… “bronze” is my favourite poem I’ve ever written, I think, which is so weird, because it’s only around twenty syllables long.

SL: But it’s so good.

OF: Becky didn’t understand it (laughs).

SL: Becky’s boyfriend didn’t understand it. Becky liked it.

OF: I think that was a turning point, where you can see that my poetry starts to get like how I write now. It goes from, before that, being very abstract, and not refined at all. I didn’t really have any concept of musicality at the beginning of first year, and it wasn’t until The Poem module that taught me about scansion and metre, and I started using that in my poetry. Obviously I knew about things like iambic pentameter, and sonnets, and stuff like that, but just really paying attention to poetry by ear is what really changed. I think “bronze” is my… my volta in my corpus, if you will…

(both laugh)

OF: ...because that’s the first poem I can point to that’s really musical. Every metrical foot has a purpose. Everything means something. I think the best thing about that poem is how it reads to the ear, so my poetry now has a lot more focus on how it sounds, which I think is so important to poetry being an oral form. You know, you’re meant to read it out loud. That’s where it’s come from, and that’s where it’s going. Sorry to the modernists!

SL: I have found that when I think of my poetry as something to be read out loud, that changes it. Especially because the last two things that I’ve written (“Inheriting October” and “December 1st”) have been things that I’ve written to a deadline (referring to Creative Writing Society events) because I’m going to read them out loud. That has definitely changed things, because it means that I will read them out loud during the process of writing and looking back at it. That also comes back to the thing that you’re on about, with musicality and making sure that the rhythm works and makes sense to me. Also it just means I’ve been writing things because I want to make people laugh—

OF: (laughs) You have got a very good comedic edge to your poems.

SL: Why thank you.

OF: I was thinking about putting something comical in one of my poems — it probably would’ve been a big tonal shift if I’d put it in the poem I read out the other day, and I just don’t know how I’d make someone laugh. It’s such a good skill, and you’re very good at it…

SL: Thank you.

OF: …and I hate you for it.

(both laugh)

SL: One of my favourite poets is Wendy Cope. There was a Wendy Cope poem I meant to send you, that I was going to read at the recent Feminist Society X Creative Writing Society event, but I didn’t, because it felt like too much of a shift from people talking about quite serious things — it’s not exactly a silly poem, but it’s just quite light in comparison. I do envy people who can say a lot without having to go for… melancholy. I just think it’s so easy to play into that, and to be a bit cliché, and not say much with it, because we are already so familiar with the forms of representing it. Whereas I feel you can say a lot more with humour, potentially, because we might not be so used to it…

OF: Do you think that comedy takes an edge off of what you’re saying?

SL: Takes the sincerity away from it?

OF: No, no, no — that’s not what I mean at all. I’m interviewing you now.

(both laugh)

SL: I’ve been trying to escape this!

OF: Do you think it… softens the blow when you’re talking about serious things?

SL: Maybe… Yes. I think there are times — I don’t know if I’m quite answering your question here — but my first thought was that there are times when I write things with some humour in it, and it’s definitely… there’s an element of self-preservation there…

OF: Yes.

SL: …if I’m talking about something vulnerable, I can put something funny in there, so people don’t feel like, ‘Oh God, we’ve got to take her away to therapy right now.’

(both laugh)

OF: You answered my question perfectly. That’s exactly what I was thinking.

SL: But also, I am against… I’ve realised this year, in particular, that I’m kind of ideologically opposed to— 

OF: —humour. 

SL: The concept of triviality.

OF: (sounding surprised) Okay!

SL: Like, I don’t want things to be small. I know some things can literally be trivial; I’m not saying everything has to be important in a big blanket statement, but I think that’s partly why I’m interested in animals in literature, and also why I’m interested in humour. I don’t like the idea that because something has a lightness to it, that means it’s unimportant.

OF: No, I definitely agree with that. Humour’s no lower a form... Maybe — maybe crude humour. Bawdy Shakespeare. Farts jokes aren’t quite high academic. I think there’s a lot to be said for humour. I think, in the worst times, humour makes it just that little bit more manageable. I think that’s very real, and very far from trivial. Okay, I’ll take my interviewer hat off now!

SL: Just coming back to the idea of development from first year to now, what would you say has been the biggest shift for you in terms of realising what sort of thing you want to write?

OF: I used to think so… all of my poems had to have some bigger impact. I did A-Level Lit, and a lot of the stuff we did had… like, the key to easy marks was to talk about political impact. You know, how does this impact the real world? And I thought that it had to do that. But now, the shift was moving away from that, and — I’ll cite “bronze” for this — because, the poems I had in Enigma in first year “bronze” and “my mother: she burns”, with the last one being about climate change and ecology. That’s definitely an important thing to talk about, but I didn’t think I was necessarily in a place to do that. So it’s that shift to more personal — towards the smaller things… not trivial!

SL: I think there is a lot to be said for turning to smaller things, but that doesn’t mean that they’re inherently apolitical, or not relating to wider issues.

OF: Yeah, I think my focus has been adjusted. That’s one of the reasons I was so into undoing English, because I want to learn how writing is good to make my writing better, and I think that’s definitely happened. My personal tutor, Simon Rennie—

SL: Shoutout.

OF: Shoutout. Go to Inn Verse, by the way! So, one of the reasons I have this connection between poetry and orality is that he’s very big on that, and also he says that none of the great poets were not poetic scholars. Everyone you think about who was a good poet knew poetry, knew poetry really well. You think of Shelley, and how tight his poems are. “Ode to the West Wind”, for example, is heavy and contingent on its form, but it works so well, because he knows what he’s doing. So yeah, the shift from first year to third year was really just a process of learning.

SL: Education!

OF: Education. Everyone should get one! The world would be a better place if we all had to do literature for three years.

SL: I agree. Okay, now if you could tell me a bit about your literary influences — some of which we’ll have touched on already…

OF: Wilde is a big one. Really huge. I think I take my aesthetical preferences from Wilde and the Decadents, and late Victorian Gothic; that’s where the bright colours and the slight intimations of gore comes from in my poems. Gore feels like the wrong word, because it sounds like I’m encouraging that, but the representation of blood and stuff… that definitely comes from Decadents and the Gothic. Who else?... I haven’t read a lot of Ted Hughes, but he was really impactful when I was writing poems like “in june”, because birds! (laughs) I read a bit of Thom Gunn. I don’t have one poet that I keep coming back to; I have a lot of disparate influences. Plath was an early — I always tried to write my own “Lady Lazarus” when I was seventeen; I was like, ‘I will write a poem like it!’

SL: You can eat men like air.

OF: (laughs) I just love it; that is probably my favourite… Well? It was definitely my favourite poem for a time. I still shiver whenever someone reads it out loud.

SL: Which we had the pleasure of not too long ago! (referring to a reading at a CW society event)

OF: We did. It was so good. Hughes and Plath is an interesting combination, though.

SL: Yeah, I’ve always had those as two favourites, and it’s interesting. If you bring it up in front of people, they’re like, ‘so, do you hate women?’

(both laugh)

OF: There’s also Gerard Manley Hopkins and “The Windhover”; that’s probably a specific influence. The Romantics, obviously. Keats and bodies — that’s really hot. 

(Sylvie laughs)

OF: Shelley, I love. I don’t think Shelley influences my poetry too much. Maybe when I try to write a really technical, formal poem, I think: how would Shelley do this? I’m not keen on Wordsworth. Love Coleridge. That kind of pseudo-gothic in Coleridge, I kind of love that. But Wilde’s my main one. He’s my big one. He’s dad.

SL: I like that Ted Hughes was an influence for specific poems, because he kind of got me into poetry.

OF: Interesting.

(Sylvie goes on a tangent about writing a creative response to Ted Hughes’s The Hawk in the Rain at A-Level)

SL: …I think that was a good way for me to get into poetry, because I’ve always been reluctant to use the word ‘I’. I’ve been reluctant to be vulnerable in poetry, which is something I’ve learnt to do more recently, but it was kind of nice to be taken into creative writing by a writer who is quite impersonal. With the exception of Birthday Letters, I think Ted Hughes does shy away from having himself in a poem, so in drawing inspiration from him, I could just turn to animals.

OF: I suppose that’s another reason we write about animals—

SL: To avoid ourselves.

[End of Interview Part I]