In Conversation with Oliver Fiore: Part II

You can read Oliver’s poetry here.

SL: Weirdly, I learned how to make my poetry more personal when I started reading T. S. Eliot who, even more than Ted Hughes, is incredibly impersonal. Eliot wrote of the personal as something that shouldn’t exist in poetry. He just went: No! T. S. Eliot doesn’t exist here. Just voices.

OF: Just a collection of voices.

SL: But I wanted to kind of reinvent this and think, what would T. S. Eliot do if he was self-obsessed and painted his nails?

OF: I bet he would’ve done that, if he were born forty years later.

SL: And was less of a bigot.

OF: (laughs) I think he would’ve been, if he was born forty years later.

SL: One can hope. Next I was going to ask if you have any particular non-traditional creative influences?

OF: Florence and the Machine as a band really influence me. There’s that ethereal element to everything they do, and Florence is kind of this transcendent figure. She is, I suppose, like a bird; she’s here and there; she exists and she doesn’t. She has such a soft speaking voice, and then the power of… something. I feel like there’s a good metaphor in there somewhere!

SL: I love the idea of her not existing. Like, I’ve never seen her, so she’s not real.

OF: I have seen her! But someone who runs about a stage in a flowy, wispy, very Grecian muslin… And barefoot…

SL: There’s something quite Pre-Raphaelite muse about her.

OF: There is, isn’t there? Pre-Raphaelite. Oh, Christina Rossetti! Big influence. There we go. But that’s more traditional. As for non-traditional… I like Lorde, but she doesn’t really influence how I write. Other than Florence, none of my musical interests really influence how I write, in that sense.

SL: Do you have any influences in film or TV? I know that sounds like more of an influence for a prose writer, but—

OF: Not really. I’m sure there are, but I don’t watch enough film and TV to come back to it, really. Not a big film & TV person. I’m too impatient. Oh, but there was one recently, actually — that hasn’t made its way into my poems yet — which is maybe serves more academically, but there was a show on Netflix recently called Midnight Mass, and it was very… It imagined the biblical angel as an actual vampire. There’s something really abject about it. It’s like, oh, this thing we thought was an angel all this time is actually a vampire! 

SL: (laughs) Surprise!

OF: Surprise! I think that’s really fun. I think it’s a nice way to bring new… A thing that comes up in the gothic now, is that we’ve kind of run out of monsters — not run out, but there’s not a modern gothic image. And I think that, doing as the Victorians did, and looking backwards, is where that’s going to come from, and I think that vampire-angel is such a cool idea. 

(Sylvie sets Ollie the Christmas break homework task of watching all of Fleabag)

SL: Tell me about your academic interest in bodies. What drew you to this line of thinking, and does this influence your creative process at all?

OF: I love bodies. I’m always thinking about bodies. 

(Sylvie laughs)

OF: When did this start? It came up, probably in first year, probably when we did Foucault, and then we had the week on bodies and medicine. And I thought: oh, wow, this makes so much sense. I was looking a lot in first year towards the queer theory elements in everything. I was like: I must find gay in everything.

SL: (laughs) Where are they lurking?

OF: Where are they lurking? Where are we lurking? And it was discourse, but in The History of Sexuality terms, like, the invention of the homosexual in Foucault. So it was Foucault…

SL: He invented gays.

OF: He invented gays. So, that the body is the site for everything corporeal, everything political, everything tangible, everything human, I suppose. Obviously there are a lot of philosophical questions about the body and mind. I don’t really touch on those because I don’t understand it! (laughs)

SL: Because I’m scared!

OF: I am scared; I don’t know! So Foucault branched off to Butler, for a bit. Judith Butler. How we dress our bodies, how that affects discourses. Then, my most recent discovery about the body was the concept of the abject, in Julia Kristeva — that everything that upsets the subject / object boundaries — like corpses are abject, because they’re meant to be human and alive but it’s dead and also a human? You know, it’s not moving, and that’s something I associate with humanity. Also, anything that’s supposed to be inside the body that’s outside the body, that’s gone through that skin-boundary, I suppose, that unsettles our conceptions of the self. These all invoke some kind of horror. As a site for everything that happens, as a site for boundaries, and discourse and how we talk about things. Also, this is probably another non-traditional influence, actually. I’m mixing up all these questions.

SL: It’s the remix!

OF: It’s the remix!

(both laugh)

OF: Alt-J’s “Dissolve Me”. So, when I was getting into body studies, September-time last year, I rediscovered, I suppose, Alt-J, and they have a song called “Dissolve Me”. Like that’s so… wow… like you just don’t want to be anymore. So that’s really cool. And the idea of dissolution as being a response to pain or trauma or — it’s not death; it’s the wish to remain being but not bodied, because we locate the body as the site of pain. I suppose it’s really dark when you think about it! 

SL: I was just going to bring up Olivia Laing’s book Everybody. At one point she refers to dissolving as an experience of extreme relief; there’s a moment when she references The Waves, and she’s talking about a bit where Woolf references being dissolved by rain or water or something — and Laing just writes: ‘Imagine the relief.’ 

OF: There is a sense of relief. It’s something we’ve never experienced and never will experience, but it’s so heavily — I wouldn’t even say romanticised, because when I think of romanticisation, I think of there being something dangerous in it. But there’s no danger in it, because we’re never going to really dissolve, but it’s that idea of something we can never do but really really really want to,  There’s a big, I think, reliance on dissolution in Victorian women’s poetry, to escape the body — to escape patriarchy and discourses — to be free. Because I suppose, even when you’re dead, you’re still in there somewhere—

SL: Still in the old flesh prison.

OF: Exactly, the old flesh prison. Or the old ash prison.

(both laugh)

OF: It’s like something that… to become immaterial. Woolf, actually, has this idea of being amorphous. Not disembodied, but, in The Waves… one of those descriptive bits… I haven’t read it in a while—

SL: You mean those italicised bits. The nature descriptions. 

OF: Yes yes yes. Those descriptions of everything becoming amorphous, of everything blending, and then I thought: wow, that’s so cool. Again, that’s like with bodies, the destabilising of boundaries without breaking them. I think that’s another reason why I turn back a lot to bodies, because we can — if we look towards destabilising them without breaking them, what does that bring up? How do we shift and change the idea of bodies? Because they’re not ever really, truly fixed, because of a lot of the ways we construct bodies is linguistically, as well. 

(Sylvie goes on a tangent about historicised scientific discourses on theoretical waves, as discussed in the “Medical and Scientific Contexts” section of Michael Whitworth’s Authors in Context book on Woolf)

SL: Something I’ve really liked, this year in particular, is just realising how many people here have theoretical niches. I wasn’t expecting that. I mean, it makes so much sense, because obviously people are here because they like what they study, but I just love finding out about that…

OF: Where’s your theoretical niche?

SL: Affect.

OF: Oh, of course it is! Duh.

SL: Get with the program. No, there are various ones that I find interesting, but that’s what I come back to. 

OF: I suppose affect is also to do with bodies.

SL: Yeah. It’s visceral.

OF: It’s visceral. I’m not too clued-in on affect, really. I haven’t read as much on affect as I should’ve done—

SL: Sometimes I don’t think I have! But I know I can write about it.

OF: I always feel that with theory. Even though I feel like I’ve got a good enough understanding of it. Even if I’ve read countless primary and secondary works, I still feel like there’s something I’m not quite getting. But I suppose it’s because it’s so expansive. And we were talking about things like affect, and bodies, and psychoanalysis—

SL: Big words.

OF: Big words. These big concepts, so there’s always something to be left unsaid.

SL: Also, I think, as a general rule, the more you get into reading, the more you realise you haven’t read.

OF: So many things. So much published.

SL: So little time.

OF: Upon this corporeal world.

SL: On this material world. And we are just material girls. My favourite material philosopher, Madonna.

(both laugh)

OF: I liked her collected works, Vogue.

SL: Yeah, The Immaculate Collection. I’m going to move on to a question about your interest in aestheticism. I’d like you to tell me about this interest, potentially in relation to poetic style / musicality in poetry.

OF: So, that came up just with my interest in Wilde, because it’s just so darn pretty, and I love pretty things. I think pretty things are the spice of life. Generally, I think… the contrast between the beautiful and the sublime. The sublime doesn’t come up that much in my writing, but it comes up a lot in my…

SL: (laughs) …but I look at mountains sometimes, and think: wow!

OF: (laughs) I’m so small! No, but just to ground myself, really, and in my academic studies, the sublime is huge. I was reading Coleridge’s “The Nightingale” as research for my nightingale essay, and there’s this bit with this old abandoned castle and a hundred nightingales… I just wrote ‘This is sublime!’ next to it. I used to try to write so politically — that’s obviously really opposed to aestheticism, in some senses. I just like things that are really pretty, and I think things can be made for the art and still exist within a political discourse. I think the important thing is that things are pretty, and that’s something that I try and invoke in my poetry, again with colours, and with some idea of beauty. I’m really conflicted at the moment with this idea of beauty and decay, because of things going on in my personal life. But this idea of what can be rescued about beauty in decay, because decay is so horrible; it’s the opposite of growth, which sounded so philosophical in my head, but it’s just the definition. (laughs) But I feel like there is something inherently romantic about decay — about a slow decline — and I don’t know how much I agree with that. Something I come back to a lot is Shelley’s “Adonais”, which is his version of the Adonis, but Keats is Adonis, when Keats died. Obviously there’s beauty in rebirth, but to get to rebirth you need death, and in death you get decay, so I don’t know how I stand about that at the moment. It’s a struggle with myself at the moment, about whether I can find beauty in everything. There’s my inner aesthetician, that’s telling me to find beauty in everything, and then my pragmatist, going: is there really? Can you find it everywhere? Are there things that just resist beautification? Things that resist beauty?

SL: Me.

OF: (laughs) But aestheticism is definitely one of the things that got the ball rolling for me. But again, as with all of the things that we’ve discussed, I don’t know if I’m adept with it yet.

SL: I feel like you’ve kind of already talked about this, but I will ask this anyway, in case there’s anything you wanted to add, just about your thoughts about the need for a reconciliation between the interest in aesthetics and the need to create art that says something actual?

OF: Yeah, I do think that aestheticism was a bit dramatic (laughs). And I understand the need to not create art with an inherent political purpose. Obviously, because, I suppose it was reactionary back then. And I think to think of aestheticism outside of its original context is not giving it enough credit, I suppose? Victorian literature was always so… moralistic. It always had to say something… or, not always, but a lot of it had to say something. I think that in rejecting that, they were saying that: it can just be pretty. And, you know, it can just be pretty, but even then, it’s still saying something political. Or not even necessarily political, but it can be saying something Big. Capitalised. So whilst I might not necessarily go into something thinking about what I’m saying about the world, I know that it will do, because my relationship to it is not the only relationship to it that exists. I’m not going to control how someone else reads it; I can’t control how someone else reads it, and I think a lot of what something means comes from how it’s widely interpreted, as opposed to — I really hate intensely biographical readings of works. Especially with Plath, and stuff—

SL: Definitely.

OF: …people will say: ‘oh, she wrote this because Ted Hughes was nasty.’ Like, maybe she did, but also that doesn’t prove—

SL: —and also, that takes away from ideas of art as a deliberate construction, to see it as the product of trauma solely. I think it takes away from the author’s autonomy. And also it’s a text; it’s not an extension of a person.

OF: Exactly. Obviously, if you get too hung up on that, that creator and ownership pairing, but they don’t necessarily know what everything means. I’m sure there are things in some of the stuff that I’ve written, where, if someone else were to analyse it, they’d get something completely different to what I intended, or something deeper. In some of the poems that I’ve written, there’s not really anything deeper, or not something intended beneath the surface level, but I’m sure it exists, you know? That someone else could take from that. The author is not king.

SL: I thought I’d end talking to you about your role as President of the Creative Writing Society. So, things that you’ve found rewarding, things that you’ve found particularly striking—

OF: —the power.

(both laugh)

OF: No. I like the idea of making a community. Especially with creative writing, because it’s so vulnerable, I love the events we do, when we’re all reading our own work. I love the idea that someone can be comfortable enough to read something they’ve produced, maybe for the first time. Those are my favourite type of events, when we do readings, and I also just love Enigma conceptually. It’s really fulfilling my late Victorian, or modernist, like: I will make a journal! This is our brainchild. And I’m not afraid to romanticise a literary journal. There’s something so… high-literature… so… this is so sad, but something so cool about it! So yeah, literary journals are cool!

SL: They are cool.

OF: That’s something I’ve always wanted to be a part of. Weird that I never went for Journal Editor; I’m surprised I didn’t go for that in second year, because the journal is one of my favourite things… It’s so key to my relationship with the society. I don’t think we’d be the same without Enigma. 

SL: I like that you picked up on how nice it is to make people comfortable sharing their work. That’s such a big part for me. I mean, I care about comfort in general — I like comforting things—

OF: Comfort in trauma (laughs).

SL: (laughs) Yeah, basically. But no, I just like the idea of cultivating a space where people feel comfortable sharing things — just because it is so scary, and I think, for a lot of people… Not everyone necessarily has a circle of friends with that same interest in the creative process, and being able to send something somewhere, and have somebody respond in a supportive way, is so important. I feel quite lucky that I get to facilitate that for people.

OF: I do think we need more spaces like that to be creative. I would love for creative writing culture to be so intense and vibrant. That’s my utopian vision, just everyone sitting around reading poetry. This is veering away from the topic, but just… getting people interested in poetry again, because…

SL: What happened to poetry?

OF: What happened to poetry? I do blame the modernists (laughs).

SL: (laughs) You’re allowed. 

OF: Because I think that a lot of Victorian poetry was very popular — obviously, was at the advent of the novel — they kind of exist side by side. And then, when the novel becomes the common form, I suppose — the thing that most people are reading, then that sort of supercedes poetry. I think that the modernists had something to do with that, in that they made poetry into just high-brow poetry. I love bawdy ballad poetry. There’s no metre better than the ballad. That really veered off-topic.

SL; No, I like that as a closing statement: bring back poetry!

OF: Bring back poetry to the masses!

SL: Also, because, what is it that students write more than anything?

BOTH: Poetry!

SL: They do.

OF: We need to cultivate our garden, to quote Voltaire (laughs). We must cultivate our garden.