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Abstract
This interview with the poet Glenda George and Lewis Johnson (PhD student, University of Liverpool) took place over email during December 2021–March 2022. George discusses her early work in the British Poetry Revival, examining the impacts of class and gender on her experience as a writer. George describes her role in the development of the poetry magazine Curtains (1971–1978), discussing her translation process and her reason for translating the French avant-garde into English. George concludes by tracing her poetics from the 1970s and 1980s into the present, offering her views on contemporary poetry and poetics.
Acknowledgements
With thanks to Glenda, for her time and patience when answering these questions.
The following poems have been reprinted from Dissecting the Corpus (1979) with the author's permission.
Notes
1 Robert Hampton and Peter Barry (eds), The New British Poetries: The Scope of the Possible, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993, p. 8.
2 I initially undertook translation work out of necessity rather than desire; we could not afford translators. While I lacked confidence in myself as a writer in those early days, I was more confident as a translator—perhaps because there were very few ‘rivals’ translating in the same way. Translation needed me to be more self-confident, more forward.
3 I would add that the presses long established as ‘British Poetry Publishers’, by which I mean the likes of Faber & Faber, were largely not interested in anything radical. The poets who were published by such institutions did not seem willing to risk their position by petitioning on behalf of others. It was such exclusion that led to the widespread sprouting of the alternative publishing scene.
5 An inseam is the American word for ‘inside leg’, which is usually only applied to men.
6 J2_Reissues_Reality-Studios_07_1985.pdf (upenn.edu).
7 Maybe it was subtler than direct influence, an appeal to a shared sense of the words being born of thebody and not simply the mind.
8 After my split from Paul Buck, I married, and continue to be married to, a man who was outside the poetry circle but was nevertheless intensely interested in the arts. His grandmother hung on the fringes of the Bloomsbury Group, herself a working class woman with pretensions, and it was her daughter, my mother-in-law, who introduced me to the poetry of Robert Frost when we first met.
9 Jeff Nuttall appeared to like the eroticism in my work, although I’m quite sure he saw it in a different way to me.
10 Elmer McCurdy died during a gun battle with a police department in Oklahoma in 1911. His corpse was later stolen and repeatedly sold throughout the twentieth century, finally being discovered in an amusement park in 1976; there it had hung from gallows for five years having been mistaken for a dummy.
11 I also produced a series of ‘forbidden drawings’—slightly exhibitionist and comic—which were admired by Head of the Arts Department at Calderdale Council. We eventually realized they would not pass the prudish members of the Council, meaning any funding for an exhibition would not be approved, so they were never displayed.
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