HOSPITAL interview by Chris Goode

The awesomely talented playwrite and poet Chris Goode recently interviewed me about my new book of poetry, HOSPITAL, for a feature on Dennis Cooper's blog. I thought I'd post the interview up here:

I want to start right at the end, way past where the poems (allegedly) stop, in the eerie white space where it's all over, and you say: "Thank you to all of my friends." This is typical you, of course: and I want to use it as a way of starting to talk about one of the most gripping things about Hospital, which is its candour. Some of these pieces are more oblique or circuitous in the way they do it, some are more direct and more overtly raw, but all of them, without exception, exhibit a candour which is both lovely and excruciating (in a way that poets as various as Wieners and Celan are often excruciating). From my perspective in theatre, there's a huge question around the making of the artwork in the absence of the audience who will eventually encounter it: but this is no less true of poetry, though perhaps simultaneously more and less true in that perhaps you will never actually meet or know or share a physical space with most of your audience. And yet I think there's a kind of candour that just feels impossible without some sense of an audience, or a reader, helping to orient you as you write. Is that true for you? Do you think about readers -- particular readers, or a general readership, say -- as you write? Or does that make it impossible? Perhaps you can only be that candid if you don't think about the reader. But your commitment to participating in communal spaces like DC's blog suggests the importance to you of a network of others who are picking up the signals you put out. I wonder what it means to you to write for others, as much as or maybe even more than you write for yourself?


Well I’ve always told myself that I write for me and nobody else. I think that’s pretty much true in as much as when I ask myself ‘would I still write if I knew that nobody was ever going to read it?’ then the answer would be ‘yes’. More recently I have been thinking more about the idea of the audience and who is going to be reading what I’m writing, not particularly with any specific intent. I mean, I post something on my blog every day and I’m regularly getting feedback and feeding back to other people about their work. Through blogging and specifically the community over at DC’s I’ve been able to have access to a network or artists and writers that has been invaluable to me; mainly that’s been through being able to gain access to other people’s work and being able to get inspired by them, correspond with them and talk about ideas, tastes and that sort of thing. I’ve never really known too many writers or anything like that in my day to day life – some of my best friends are visual artists, musicians etc, but there have never been too many writers around me, so it’s been good to be able to find that comradeship. In terms of whether that audience or that potential audience has effected how I write I’m not too sure. Usually I think maybe it doesn’t too much – I mean yeah, like I say I get inspired and crazily excited by what other people are doing, but I dunno - ultimately I think I know when I’ve finished a piece of writing that does what I want it to. I guess I’m saying that I don’t really look to an audience for approval or whatever, but it’s definitely good if people want to read my work. With Hospital though, or at least with some of the poems in there, it was definitely different. I was definitely aware that in some ways there was a lot less fiction (?) to some of the pieces than I usually allow myself. To some people I think that some of the poems will still be able to be read as being fairly abstract, but to anyone who knows me then I guess it’s obvious that these poems are about what happened with my mother’s death and a lot of the stuff surrounding that. And I was aware of the fact that with certain poems I was saying very personal things very openly. In some ways I think I can be a very private person so that was strange. Also, with this collection it was the first time that I really showed it to some friends and actually said “what am I doing here? What do you think of these?” because usually I can detach myself a little from things and view my work from a distance. With some of the stuff in Hospital I was still and I’m probably still am very much in the middle of things. Some of the poems are so close to me still that I can barely see them yet.


Yeah, it's obvious that Hospital is quite exceptional in its directness, its nakedness. I mean this quite precisely: a lot of poetry pretends to a sort of nakedness that actually isn't nakedness but nudity -- in the terms of John Berger's distinction: "nudity is nakedness clothed in art". The loss of the fictional or ironic matrix in Hospital has the effect of burning the artistic clothing off the work, and not only the clothing but some of the skin I guess. The really necessary corollary of this, it seems to me, is exactly the process of exposure -- exposure of the work, and exposure of yourself through it -- that you describe, which has a kind of recklessness embedded in it. I mean, you describe yourself asking questions of friends about the work in Hospital -- "What am I doing here?" -- in a way that indicates you maybe don't know, or can't know, in these instances, whether you've "finished a piece of writing that does what [you] want it to". The ransacking of your own accustomed privacy becomes both a risk -- to the extent that you're left vulnerable by it -- and a compulsion -- because how else can this writing exist? Don't tackle this question too directly if you don't want to, or if you don't recognize yourself inside what it suggests, but I wanted to ask whether you detected in yourself as you were writing these pieces, or whether you detect now in retrospect, an impulse almost to self-harm? That the rawness and necessary recklessness together generate a sensation of pain a significant component of which is the inability (perhaps) of mere literature to contain or express or alleviate the unconscionable larger pain that it's somehow "about"; but that the generation of a kind of exemplary pain is kind of the only rational response, in much the way that to some people I've known who are cutters, say, their self-injury is far more logical and controlled than the chaos of the deeper existential pain to which it somehow refers. I wonder whether the uncharacteristic act of sharing work before you can be sure it's finished or ready is a response, conscious or otherwise, to an onslaught of pain and grief for which you also aren't, and could never be, ready? Is that something that was palpable within your sense of urgency to get the book out as quickly as possible?

One of the things that I love about writing is that I don’t and I don’t think I ever will fully understand it. I just know that I have this compulsion to do it. When I don’t do it I panic, like there’s something missing, and I know that in the stretches when I haven’t wrote I’ve tended to feel a lot worse about things. But it’s strange because it’s not always like writing always makes me feel better so it never seems to fit completely into an idea of catharsis or anything like that – sometimes I think it is, and others I’m not so sure or can’t tell. When I was finishing Hospital, I was talking to a friend and she said to me that she thought it was really great how I’d not stopped writing through all of what was going on, and I told her that it had never even occurred to me to stop, or just to not write. I have to write, and the majority of the time I’d say that I don’t know why and I’m happy existing in that not knowing space. The self harm comparison is ... hmmm ... I don’t know ... Like I say, in a lot of ways I still feel like I’m too close to some of this to make a proper assessment, perhaps with a bit more time I’ll be able to see things a bit more clearly, and perhaps I won’t. That retrospect hasn’t really appeared yet, you know? I do think though that you may have a point about how self harmers’ injuries are more logical than the feelings that have led them to hurt themselves. That notion of doing something painful to make sense of something is perhaps close to what I was doing. I felt numb during my mother’s death and I still do – aside from when I sat next to her hospital bed and watched a doctor turn off her life support machine, I have only cried once. Things haven’t sunk in fully yet, I don’t think. I’ve felt blank and removed a lot of the time. The only times that I have felt certain emotions is while I’ve been writing, and yeah, some of it hurt a lot. I think my wanting to get the collection out quickly was all about wanting to try and achieve some kind of distance, put it away from myself, so I can try and work it out a little bit more.

That sense of numbness that you describe comes through very strongly in Hospital, I think, and one of the things that's scariest about this work is how it shows up the involvement, even the complicity, of language in that numbness: that as someone for whom writing is a primary and almost involuntary response, words are in a sense your tools, your technology, but even language can't help but renege on its implicit promise of precision, say, or the ability to 'capture' and hold on to events or emotional states. So the book is full of language that is participating in untruth, in fact entirely constitutes that untruth -- "words are doing / their best to keep away the / most terrifying thoughts...", or "I keep trying to tell myself..."; language out of focus, "that I would skim and not pronounce correctly", or blurrily remote because "I've not been close enough to read what the / writing says yet" or because the speaker "[can] barely understand what any of / The words say anyway..."; language adrift from image and authority (as with the YouTube Vlogger); language that falls short of the emotion it's reaching for, such that while some "[people] have a way with words", this facility is meaningless because "there was no way / to say stuff properly / so the words / didn't really matter". This deep, somewhat paradoxical disconsolation associated with words, with language, strikes me as one of the most important and most productive features of your writing.

The questions I want to steer these observations towards would be, I guess, about the relation between language on the one hand, and on the other the kind of virtual spaces that fascinate you in your work as much as me in mine (and Dennis in Dennis's, etc.) -- here, for example, the vlogger's space, the celebrity / fantasy space of Cliff Richard, the degraded image-space of old video, and perhaps even the unknowable dream space which you conclude the collection by invoking. Two things come to mind. Firstly, I wonder if you would recognize at all the similarity between experiences of grief or bereavement (and of course the strange liminality of the coma state), and those virtual or heavily ironic media spaces: that there's a concern with what is untouchable (even with language) versus what can be touched; with what, in relation to a person, is lost and unrecoverable, versus what is palpable and permanent. I suppose this question is partly proposing that the pieces in the collection that maybe seem not to relate so directly to your experience with your mum nonetheless are trying to grasp and describe or present exactly the same predicament in a different context, in a way that's almost tantamount to a kind of retrofitting of allegory. And secondly, I wonder, given the kind of failure of language that you return to a lot, where words fit in here? I mean I suspect that for a lot of writers, they are seeking to use language to conjure plausible fictions that counteract, through a sense of intimacy and of proximity, the remoteness of the virtual, summoning a kind of reality that aspires to enact the same kind of contact as touch; whereas for you it seems like language itself might be virtualised, too remote and unstable and illegible or incomprehensible to keep its promise of nearness. I suppose I'm asking partly about your feeling of being, if anything, too close to the writing to be able to see it, and wanting to get the book out quickly in order to create some distance; I wonder whether what that distance ever can confer the opening up of a reliable and clarifying objectivity, or whether the poems themselves actually are formed out of the impossibility of that objectivity and the impossibility -- even the refusal -- of clarity. Does that make any sense to you?

Yeah, well the idea of language being limited is definitely key to a lot of my work. I sometimes think I’ve set myself up to fail – I’m a writer who thinks that words can’t do their job properly. I don’t think that’s such a rare thing though, it’s something that I’ve read a few writers talk about. When I write, what I’m often aiming for isn’t really to do with plot or narrative so much as it is to do with attempting to set up a way of translating various feelings that I find myself plagued by – I have an idea of a feeling or an idea that moves me in some way, but it remains elusive to me, and impossible to articulate. So what I’m trying to get out of myself with writing seems to be something built by words, but simultaneously separate from them. It feels very instinctive most of the time. Despite the discrepancies I’ve never stopped thinking that language and writing can do very special things – I only have to think about the times that other people’s work has just left me feeling devastated, understood or alive, to remember that. With regards to the virtual spaces that I write about, this is very much linked. Just like language, these online spaces are attempting to convey truth through inherently artificial means; they’re trying to pin things down in this weird way that they just can’t do. But the tension between what they’re trying to do and what they actually are is something that fascinates me. I think a good example is something like MySpace and sites like that, which I’ve used in several things that I’ve wrote over the last year or so. People have these artificial tools that make it so easy for themselves to remould an impression of their reality that they would like to display for people as a new version of their truth – they have more control than ever about how they would like people to see them. It’s so easily to use these virtual spaces to manipulate The Self of the representation of that Self. I’m interested in the idea of The Impression, which is something that I think language and a lot of these virtual spaces have in common – they are both used to try and represent something they can’t, they are both just forms of impression. I’m not saying that these impressions are bad, because in their failure or in their limitedness, they do create this friction that itself can be extremely powerful. There seems to be a very definite sense of darkness and sadness layered among these surfaces. There’s a space between the actual intent of interactions in these spaces and the actual end result that just seems huge and that’s what interests me. I guess I’m interested in fakeness, you know? When I was in America last October, I found an art gallery in Austin, Texas that had a great show on called RESET/PLAY which focussed on contemporary art based around computer games and computer interaction. There was one piece by a video artist - Michael Bell-Smith – that was called While We Slept which just blew my mind. He’s used these really basic 1980s computer game graphics – basically just black and white bitmap imagery – to create this sequence that featured a world war, followed by a sunset; you know, he was trying to create these two huge powerful experiences but with totally limited technology, a tiny vocabulary of effects that had no hope of coming anywhere near the real bloodshed of a war or the true beauty of a sunset. But the fact that he tried and that gaping hole between what he was referencing and how he actually chose to reference it was just engulfing to me. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I felt a real kinship with that piece. I can definitely get a sense between these kinds of spaces and death, because something is lost. There’s something very cold about the whole thing too. The internet is a corpse.

OK, cool, there are two things I want to pull out from that.

Firstly, I'd like to unpack a bit more the question of fakeness. There's a really interesting conversation going on over here in theatre world at the moment about the way in which fakeness relates or doesn't relate to failure. A whole bunch of practitioners, from the company Forced Entertainment onwards, have been interested in a kind of failure that seems built-in to theatre as a medium: communication failure, inherent triviality, ludicrous conventions, desperate artifice... I swallow some of this and spit out the rest: I agree that in any performance (in which I would include any performative use of language, and by extension most poetry) there is a susceptibility to failure of a kind -- noise as well as signal, in other words -- and I think you have to acknowledge that in your practice (as I've already suggested, and you've agreed, that you do); but I wonder about the fetishization of failure to the extent that one starts to simulate it. Forced Entertainment's sometimes chaotic or ramshackle-looking work has long been full of the signs of failure, but they're as carefully rehearsed and choreographed as any straight prestigious drama. What interests me about failure is not just how it lets serendipity (via noncontrol) flow through a piece, but also how everyone persists despite failure: how we know we will be misunderstood or our words may never reach their targets but still we retain (for the most part) this desire to communicate. My colleague the theatre-maker and blogger Matt Trueman recently encapsulated this as "reach[ing] for the stars with a stepladder", which I think is a great image: and your reference to that video piece really reminds me of it. In a way your discussion of virtual 'impressionism' already answers this question, but do you think of your work, and some of the cultures and spaces it describes or co-opts, as tending towards hope or towards despair in its depiction of the probably-thwarted effort to connect? I mean it feels like your ambivalence about fakeness (if that's an adequate characterisation) could go either way, but they're very different places to reach -- or maybe not?

Secondly, I wanted to use your reference to that art show you mentioned just to cue a little enquiry about how you situate your writing practice in relation to the experience and influence of other art forms. Your blog not least indicates the importance to you of visual art and music, and of course you have, or have had, a parallel practice in music in various different contexts and formats. (And what I've heard of your music / sound work really demonstrates that you're way more than just a hobbyist or a tinkerer.) The tracks of influence can sometimes be hard to discern but I wondered how much you use other artforms as stimulus for your writing -- and I guess in particular I'm asking not just about the way that your other cultural interests are reflected in a certain territory of reference and allusion in the content of your writing (and the community values, for want of a better phrase, that underwrite those), but also whether you borrow from formal or structural ideas, the effects of which might perhaps be less obvious. Oh and, hem hem, I believe you contributed to the writing of a theatre piece recently... Did that experience feel like an area you'd want to explore more? Were there things that you found particularly interesting or challenging about the adaptation of your writing practice to a more explicitly performative context?

Hmmm ... I think I’d definitely distance my work from a fetishism of failure. For me personally I don’t think I always equate the fakeness with a failure. I think that it’s interesting if that gap that can be characterised as failure can be removed or viewed as separate from and not in relation to where it was originally perceived to be aiming. Maybe then it can be observed as something aside from failure, and based on more what it is than what it isn’t. So maybe I’m placing it as a new space entirely, but I really don’t know. But yeah, I definitely find it interesting that people still keep trying, no matter what the results are. Perhaps it’s that huge desire that communication that brings the sadness to some of these places – just the fact that people are desperate to reach out. People are trying. I guess the creative process can sometimes be more interesting than the end results anyway. I know I’m excited to finish something so that I can work on something else. I like the inner silence I get when I’m writing, the weird contentedness and buzz I get. It’s like nothing else I can think of really. As for whether my depiction of these virtual spaces points towards hope or despair I think it’s probably neither. I mean, there is definitely a mixture of both hope and despair in what I do when I write about those sorts of things, but often when I’m working I’m writing about things that make me feel something that I don’t understand or can’t pinpoint. I’m sometimes trying to work things out. I don’t really have an agenda that seeks to say what is right and wrong. With a lot of my work I’m probably an observer trying to work out what I feel. And a lot of the time I don’t work it out! But it’s the search and the process involved that makes it worthwhile. I’d rather try than not.

As for other art forms then yeah – I’m constantly taking inspiration and pointers from other mediums. A lot of the time it’ll be music that sets me off. I try and translate certain moods from certain music into the writing that I’m working on. With Hospital specifically, then I was listening to a few things over and over again, especially Heretic Pride by the Mountain Goats. Some other stuff too – stuff that felt dark, dense, layered. Some Matmos stuff (hence the poem that steals their name), Fuck Buttons, Atlas Sound etc. Mainly I tend to write in silence, but while I’m thinking about a piece or letting my thoughts form a bit, then I’m listening to music constantly. There are a few rare exceptions when I find that I can write to certain bands, a band like Stars of the Lid or whatever, but usually I listen to stuff before I write or if I take a break from a piece to get a drink or a bite to eat. It’s like charging up energy in a video game or something. Heh. The same with visual art. I get a very definite sense from some art, and when I’m writing I can tell if the work I’m doing is giving me the same or a similar work to the art that’s inspired it. It’s still very hard to articulate, which is a good thing. With the novel I’m working on at the moment I’m definitely trying to pick apart music more in terms of its form and structure to see if I can use that to help propel the narrative in certain ways, but I’m still working and experimenting on that so I can’t really talk too much about it at the moment, because I’m still very much throwing shit around and seeing what sticks.

Haha ... yeah I did have a bash at some theatre work. For people reading who aren’t aware, I should probably explain that I collaborated with you and contributed some text for your recent theatre piece Hey Mathew. And yeah it is definitely something that I would be interested in exploring further. Working on Hey Mathew was without a doubt one of the most exciting creative experiences I had last year. It was cool to be doing something different. And the one of the most exciting things about it wasn’t the fact that I was working on a theatre piece, but more so the idea of collaboration. I was working with different people (in this case yourself and Jonny Liron) on something that you had already set in motion and started birthing. To be able to come in blind halfway through a project was such an enlivening prospect for me. I’ve thought a bit about how writing for this changed what I wrote, and I think the main thing was that I knew that these words would be spoken aloud by someone, and physically heard by people. I know some writers - poets especially - do write their work to be read aloud, but I really don’t. I never really imagine the words I’m writing that’s appearing on the page in front of me to be spoken by someone. Hearing my words read out loud when I came to see the show performed was a total trip, too.


Interesting, T. (I have the exact same exemption for Stars of the Lid, btw!)

We should probably start wrapping this up but your fascinating stuff about writing in order to figure something out prompts a question which will perhaps sound a bit trivial or disconnected but I'm interested to ask it anyway. Which is: do you have ambitions for your writing? Not in terms of who's reading it or how many people like it or whether you end up getting your half hour on Bookworm, but simply in terms of the particular movements of the writing itself. Are there things you're wanting to steer yourself towards trying, say formally or in terms of scale or structure? Things that you really want to work on doing "better"? Or is it again much more like feeling your way, seeing where it goes... I suppose I mean, when you're feeling your way, is it nonetheless towards a target or model of some kind?

I guess partly I'm asking, what do you think we'll see next? (I already can't wait, whatever it is...)

I’m somewhere in the middle of that. I’ve definitely been thinking a lot more about form and structure recently, especially with regards to the novel that I’ve been working on, so hopefully some of that will be in there. I’m just approaching the end of my first draft, so when I finish that, I’m definitely going to re-assess certain things and see what I can do with it in relation to the things I’ve been thinking about working with. But that’s tempered by the fact that I think that in a lot of ways I’m a very instinctive writer. I love the idea of feeling my way through work, feeling out and working out what the work is meant to be, like walking in the dark. I was listening to an album of some improvised noise stuff the other night, and I definitely felt a kinship with that, I had this image of the people composing it trying to get rid of all the space around the music, so they could see something more clearly, you know? So yeah, I’m definitely in the middle of working out where to go with formal stuff and how to use that alongside my love of just going for it in a blur and trusting my natural voice, whatever that might be. I feel like I’m learning a lot about my writing at the moment. In terms of what I’m actually doing next: like I say, I want to get my novel finished and I think that I will in the next couple of months hopefully. I would love to do some more collaboration too; working on the theatre piece sparked something in me that I would like to get to a bit more closely this time – that dialogue with another artist or artists. That seems pretty important at the moment.


Visit Chris Goode's blog and keep up to date with his constantly fascinating work.
Buy HOSPITAL here.