Bill Griffiths was born in Middlesex in 1948. He began writing poetry and publishing in 1970. Clive Bush has said ‘Griffiths’s poetry sings among the bogus, as Basil Bunting might have said, with an insouciant yet high musical intelligence almost unique among contemporary poets,’ and praised his ‘sense of local and wider history, his concern for the human soul… his dazzling lexical virtuosity, his range of forms and his commitment to vital scholarly investigation of a long range past.’ In addition to writing and publishing innumerable small press titles, Griffiths studied Old English at King’s College, London, obtaining a PhD in 1987. He is Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Northern Studies, Northumbria University, and lives in Seaham, County Durham. His latest books are The Mud Fort (a selection of poems from 1984-2004) and A Dictionary of North East Dialect. I spoke to him about this leading study of our local dialect, and the ways it has influenced his own writing.


Your life has been one of high adventure: in the early 70s you were a ‘rabid motorcyclist’…

Disruption rather than adventure, I think! I was a keen motorcyclist from the ages of 16 to 22. And I was part of a group of Angels, near Uxbridge in Middlesex. I liked them. I’ve always liked slightly unusual people. But it’s not the sort of thing you can do for very long, and I soon ran out of money for a bike…


I heard you left ‘after police harassment.’

Yes: we harassed the police. It convinced me that I wasn’t cut out to be a folk hero, and the only thing I showed a glimmer of talent at was writing poetry. Poetry in particular because it’s so condensed. It has such potential, and I’m a firm believer that poetry ought to be able to deal with any topic – not just autumn trees but bike cylinders and different people. So it was an important lesson, in that it made me want to do something else. A negative lesson.


Then you lived in Germany for a while, then came back to live on a houseboat in London which accidentally caught fire, then you were homeless for two years…

You’ve zipped through a few decades there. I sent a few poems, on spec, to Eric Mottram, who was then editor of Poetry Review, and they were accepted. Mottram introduced me to Bob Cobbing, of Writers Forum, who I immediately took to. It was marvellous: Bob used to have this printing press in his front room – it was like paradise. For the next few years I worked on that. But being involved with Bob and Eric also eventually meant getting drawn into The Poetry Society, and that was less successful. There were lots of arguments, everybody resigned, and it was a set back for more innovative poetry, and it hasn’t really recovered… ‘Innovative’ in the sense of poetry as reflecting an infinite human potential, rather than being part of a system of control. In my opinion it was a boring establishment victory of the worst sort. In disgust, I went to work in Germany for a year, but once I’d saved up some money I came back and spent it all on printing again… For a while, things went quite well with Bob and me and Paula Claire. We had some good sound poetry performances for a few years. Then I decided it was time I had a career, and took an MA and a PhD in Old English at Kings College, then moved onto a houseboat. While that was being repaired in a boatyard, the welder overheated the steel hull, and set fire to the wooden interior. It took two years to settle the claim, then I moved up to Seaham. I chose May Day, 1990, having consulted the oracles!


What brought you north?

I first came to Newcastle in about 66. It’s such a wonderful city – it was even better then: completely unreformed, uncleaned and undemolished.


It interests me that, in a sense, you avoided the trappings of being considered a British ‘citizen’ for a long time – then moved to Seaham and immersed yourself in local culture and history.

In Seaham, to an extent I am an outsider still. A lot of people have been there since the cradle, knew each other at school… obviously you can’t blend into that society. On the other hand, there are lots of people who’ve moved in, and people who’ve moved out, so I don’t feel isolated. I have friends there, and I do local history work and local dialect work…


How did you come to be interested in North East dialect?

Purely through Old English, the Anglo Saxon. When I started to list the dialect words being used around me, it struck me that there was a lot of Old English words. ‘Bairn’ for example, is exactly the same. Or ‘nowt’ for nothing.


When did you start the dialect project?

Mid 1990s, with a bit local support. I printed it myself at first – I was still into printing then. In 1998 the Centre for Northern Studies took it on as a paperback, and it sold so well we realised this was a line worth pursuing. Lots of people were interested in it, then lots of people started to get in touch, because of the wider circulation of the book.


And did they contribute to the following edition?

Yes, and I’ve already got another 30 pages for the next edition… There’s also a group called the Durham and Tyneside Dialect Group, basically that’s a newsletter publication, and some of the suggestions we had was from magazines like Durham Town and Country, and they go out to people who used to live in Durham. The dictionary covers quite a big area: Cleveland to Northumberland. So we keep everyone in touch with a newsletter and a website: www.indigogroup.co.uk/durhamdialect.


Would you distinguish between the written and the spoken word? Your study of dialect is a study of language, but, importantly, a living language – language as a social instrument…

Language is almost taken as being a definition of what a human being is. English is a remarkable language, for its simplicity and its complexity, its flexibility and so on… It’s a wonderful medium to work with. I started off playing piano rather than writing, and at some point it occurred to me that there was a limit to the combinations you could give to the twelve notes of a scale, whereas if you start off with thirty thousand words, it’s unlimited… At the same time, I like to think of things in terms of history. This is where the dictionary comes in: it’s a spoken language, but it goes back. ‘Dialect’ in the North East is often used as a synonym for ‘slang’ – but it’s more important than that. Hopefully, the dictionary might encourage people to respect it a little bit more, and not be quite so willing to forget it.


Your poems often ask to be read aloud – in fact, this often clarifies, or changes our understanding of the meaning. Is this intentional? Do you (as Basil Bunting said we should) compose your poems aloud?

I compose them in my head, very often in that unconscious zone when you’re about to nod off to sleep: I’ll suddenly get little groups of words and ideas. I need to jot them down as I’d never remember them otherwise. But an image seldom ever extends beyond a short stanza of short lines. The emphasis is on sound: I’m very much aware of rhythm and bringing different sounds together. Bob Cobbing tended to be purely sound, which is interesting too, but it seems to me that the best, fullest use of the word is when you’ve got rhythm and sound and meaning and you’re making the best use of all aspects of the word.


At the same time your work can be very difficult, very challenging… Does this strike you as a paradox?

I sort of started from a semi-folk approach… Michael McClure was one of my early heroes. But unless you’re going to commit yourself to a standard metric line of rhyme, or a free verse with a very simple vocabulary, you’re not going to be easily intelligible. I would say my work is compact, or condense, rather than difficult. If you’re trying to make every word count, then you’re not going to have much time to attend to metre or syntax in the standard sense. It’s not about deliberately ignoring them, but finding the most efficient use of the language in an image. That means cutting out anything that isn’t going to help. Having said that, there are quite a few occasions when I use ordinary, almost prosaic lines by way of contrast.


But in general you’re going for a concise, Poundian quality?

Pound was also instrumental in bringing information into poetry. I must admit I like that approach too: there’s quite a lot of found texts in my work. But unlike, say, Allen Fisher, I tend not to footnote it. Sometimes I don’t make it clear at all, because the poem has to stand for itself. It’s irrelevant where the different bits came from… There’s also the problem, as you grow older, of collecting endless facts – it’s hard to exclude that from your thought and your writing. It might sound like an older poet’s writing is more erudite or academic, but it’s simply a matter of having collected so much material, you can’t help depending on it to some extent.


You have translated widely. How has this influenced your own work? In your version of Gilgamesh for example you even translate the phonetics of the original, and something of its formal poetics…

My interest in translation started with Peter Finch, a magazine editor, who sent me a tattered 19th Century version of the Gododdin – the epic Welsh account of a battle that took place near Catterick around 600AD. I got more interested in Welsh, and that led me on to the Old English. But Gilgamesh is amazing. I looked back at transcripts of the original cuneiform, to see what was happening. It’s basically a balanced line, similar to the Psalms, with a repetition of sense in the two halves of the line: sense rhythm. Many passages in the Bible are pure poetry: the Lord's Prayer, the Sermon on the Mount, the Psalms… It comes back again in Christopher Smart, and Walt Whitman. It’s limited, in that it’s still a predictive structure, but it’s interesting – it widens our palette.


I want to ask you about the position of the poet in society. There seem to be two poles to your writing: there is sometimes a sense of isolation or even exile, reminiscent of Old English poems such as The Seafarer or The Wanderer or the Guthlac B poem, which you translated… Do you sympathise with this world view: the wanderer separated from his tribe?

The idea of the poet as an elite seer is not really my cup of tea… ‘Guthlac B’ is quite a positive poem. It’s an account of someone’s final days, so it’s not exactly cheerful, but I find the Wanderer and the Seafarer a little over the top. And they may not apply to living people – they may be abstract memories of the soul that is cast adrift of the body, lamenting its lack of a home… But is the poet isolated? No, for me there’s a historical element and a learned element, but my writing grows out of the world around me, the immediate world. People I know, things that happen, and so on.


And there are also themes of community, group identity, questioning of authority…

I see what you mean about the outsider in terms of groups and authority… It seems to me that society is claimed by an establishment, and they’re the ones that handle the funds, grants and so on. And grants are used to control the culture, and produce a certain identity, whether regional or national. I certainly don’t feel part of that set up. I don’t approve of control as a human instinct – I like to think of people as egalitarian. And the idea that you can correct problems by imposing discipline, then correct the problems of discipline by imposing further discipline – that’s a spiral that will end lamentably. So in that sense, yes, I’m on another side.


Your commissioned poem, Trawler Race, invites the reader to participate (literally) in the creation of the poem, but also eschews linear, prose ‘sense.’ How did you approach the commission?

When you approached me for a poem, I was working with a lengthy single-column poem, based on a video of fishing boats around Amble. It didn’t have any commentary, but the core of it is a trawler race they put on for tourists. There was a mixture of images, lasting forty five minutes. When I looked back at it, it wasn’t really a sequence poem: there were lots of one-line images. There was no specific order, so I put on each webpage three to five lines that can be adjusted, and there was a sequence of nearly twenty pages. The reader can sample as much or as little as they like. Each frame is loosely linked in some way to the next one, but that sense of not having a narrative is there from my earliest work.


As a publisher of many small press titles, what impact do you think the internet will have?

There are endless advantages to the internet: not only does it take huge amounts of text, but you also have colour, which is something I’ve seldom had, unless the staples rusted! On the other hand, the internet isn’t ideal for reading large texts. Most visitors to a webpage only stay for a second, then they’re off. If anything, web literature should help produce a more compact approach.


What are you working on next? 

A Tour of the Fairground. A poem for each ride: the caterpillar, the dodgems, the ghost train… I like writing sets of poems – I’ve done sets of insects, and sets of vegetables for example! – it gives you something to work towards. I hope that will grow into a dozen poems. I’m also hoping Etruscan books will publish some of my longer poems.

This interview first appeared on www.acknowledgedland.com