Petra Whiteley immigrated to UK in 1993 from the Czech Republic. Her poetry has appeared in Osprey, The Glasgow Review, ETC, Seven Circle Press, The Gloom Cupboard, Eviscerator Heaven and Unlikely Stories 2.0. She is also a prose editor for Eviscerator Heaven. Several of these e-zines also published her articles on political and current issues (left-wing position), history and methods of literary and poetic movements as well as essays on and reviews of current poets, lyricists - with more forthcoming. Some of her poetry will also appear in Apt and Eleutheria. Ettrick Forest Press published her first poetry collection The Nomad's Trail in September 2008. She is currently working on a children's book with visual artist Steve Viner.
Petra Whiteley discusses poetic style, inspirational sources, and her future plans as a writer, with Counterexample Poetics editor, Felino Soriano.
Felino Soriano: Petra, you have a fascinating musicality to your poetry, one wrought with prosodic entities which adds a specialized layer of interest to your writings; also, your use of angular syntax compliments your musical ability. What level of awareness do you have to these elements when creating a poem?
My love of language comes equally from my love of reading books (my tastes are as eclectic in this way too) as it comes from being in love with music. Also growing up in Czech, my closest contact with English was through music. I used to translate lyrics of my favourite bands – or my friends’ favourite bands – and the template of trying to understand language within a song then translating it to Czech and having to pay attention to the musicality within my own language is very likely another component of what has laid the matrix of the musicality found in my work. Also within Czech poetry the emphasis on musicality is very strong, especially the effects of intonation of the voice to make an impact – particularly in accordance with hitting on beauty and melody. It was something I grew up with – it was like air, it just surrounded me. Many of the Czech poets that influenced me were teachers of music or musicians themselves.
My education in literature was also closely connected with having to recite poems (and remember them) so the technique of the intonation was with me since childhood – very early childhood indeed. I was also affected by my grandmother singing to me, Czech folklore is very rich, very gothic, brooding and complex – and since those songs weren’t censored according to suitability of my age, I was allowed to hear them, absorb them and they fascinated me endlessly. I would say that not only they shaped the music & poetry connections that you hear in my work, but also the thematic feel of my poetry – the very colour of it.
As to the angular syntax, I have also been involved for a short period of my life with amateur theatre and dance. Structure, as I feel it, expresses the close trance-like connection of music and dance. For me it is the manifestation of the physical element of poetry that I try to put down to the page and make the reader have a physical reaction & connection with – that I feel myself.
FS: The fascination with language you've acquired through the assistance of being a fan of reading seems to have shaped a fantastic vernacular within your written poems. In keeping with this subject, what brand of literature do you find most parallel with your preferences? Without wanting to revert too closely to a cliché question of a writer, whom do you associate with tremendous writing ability, in any written genre?
PW: From the novelists I most admire I’ll single out the novels that most affected me with their writers - Albert Camus – The Plague, Margaret Atwood – Cat’s eye, William Styron – Lie Down in Darkness, and Doris Lessing – The Golden Notebook. I could list many more and it would fill many pages, but regarding my admirations or influence these were of the greatest impact & inspiration on my reading or my own work. Each of those novels brought me to read more of their work and reaffirmed my passion for literature. What they possess is philosophical undercurrents that inspire me and resonate with me as well as widen my horizons; their styles of writing are beautiful, flowing, and innovative. Their work gives emotional and complex intensity to their characters and plots, they have intelligent humour and also their common thread is humanism.
Regarding poetry, I will go back to two Czech poets, Otakar Brezina and Karel Jaromír Erben, the later incorporated myth and gothic horror with musical verses, which could not be anything else but unforgettable. Brezina was a Czech symbolist and my admirations for his work had brought my attention to Arthur Rimbaud and Charles Baudlaire. Reading Rimbaud in particular has had an influence in the way I write and think about poetry. Anna Akhmatova and Pablo Neruda (interestingly he acquired his pen name after the Czech poet I have mentioned earlier, Jan Neruda) are another poets who left their mark. And last but not least – Sylvia Plath. Her tremendous power and imagery, so stunningly authenticity seeking contents and rich, striking visuals are great inspirations for me.
FS: You mention Rimbaud’s influence vis-à-vis your ascertaining of poetry. I would like to ask now, what is a, or your methodology when it is time to write a poem? Also, what must arrive within you to become acclimated with the thought processes necessary to compose a piece of writing?
PW: One of Rimbaud’s central ideas was that poetry must unravel and disorganise all the senses. For a reader – and me as a reader, this means a challenge to come out of socially perceived ideas into the realm of authenticity to see what is being revealed through the words. For me as a writer, this resonates with the themes that I am interested in exploring and without the poems disturbing the social layers, the social hypnosis; I could not tap into authenticity and universality, the real core of being. Working in this process disturbs my own layers, my own senses and the poetry comes as a revelation.
Writing represents process of revealing what is being revealed simultaneously with documenting what has been ‘caught’ from the depths in art form. It’s a way of transcribing experience and shaping it into words that tap into it. Rimbaud summed this up with: “I is an another. … I am the spectator at the flowering of my thought: I watch it, I listen to it: I draw a bow across a string: a symphony stirs in the depths, or surges onto the stage". He shows the poet as a seer, and that resonates with how I see my process of writing, or how I try to achieve the poem, to submerge into the being and see what IS there and bring it forth.
FS: As your biography note states, you write beyond the art of poetry, but too, articles on poetic movements. Intellectually, this spectrum of styles or movements or ideologies can reside deeply within the mind of the attempter to ascertain these poetic innovations. Is there an importance, laced with a caveat of a realistic supposition that poetic styles are similar though labelled different? What movements are you drawn to, and also, what physical or psychological prompt was posited toward you to become in acquaintance with documenting these various styles?
PW: I think the evolution of poetry is a never ending process – just like the evolution of nature and all that belongs to it, including us in the way we reflect the evolutionary processes within our thinking; although regarding the thinking of human beings, it can sometimes rather testify about the de-evolution rather than evolution with the absurd attempts at self-destruction on large scale rather than survival and preservation.
So I see poetry as a whole to be an organic body of evolving art, and see the new styles as mutations of poetry in adaptation to times & places in which the particular poets live/lived, what affects/affected them, the historical, social and artistic conditions of the world that has/had shaped them, and which had shaped their art as well as their particular sensitivities and gifts. I also think that studying history of literature is an important component of poet’s breadth of knowledge and mapping their own art. If I was a painter, I would do exactly the same.
You will have a group which experiences will resonate, their ways of expressing themselves will differ, but the resonating factors will be visible, hence the schools being defined as they are. Although some poets will not be able to be classified in any way at all, and if this categorisations are used for wrong purposes – as if art movement was a nation using propaganda for malicious means, then I think to hell with labels, but if it’s purely for points of reference for a studious mind, then they can be useful.
As for personal preferences of the individual poetic or literary movements, then I will list French Symbolism and Acmeism from poetics, and Existentialist movement from the prose and philosophy, surrealist paintings are another factor as well as the poetry that came from that art movement that influence me greatly. They all evoke and awake the most of my enthusiasm and passion; they resonate deeply within me, my experiences and my perceptions.
FS: You speaking of categorized definitions being put onto writers is or can be within subjective terminology, damaging, for in the scope of a vernacular in describing an object, person, artist, man is incessant in the need to name all, and rename the misunderstood. This is akin to an observation of a butterfly exclusively in the realm of scientific terminology, and lacking the eye to observe the myriad dimensions collocated with a beautified shape unopened to those unwilling to peruse.
I’d now like to become acquainted with what you have forthcoming, the projects that have your current attention. Also, what does poetry, in its multilayered dichotomies, define within you?
PW: I have just had a chapbook released by Shadow Archer Press called The Moulding of Seers. Unlike my first book, The Nomad’s Trail, which is a collection of many of my styles – some of which I don’t even use anymore, The Moulding of Seers is thematically connected and conceptualised short collection of my poems. They concern fragmentation of psyche, the price of the process of seeing through the eyes of the ‘seer’ – and poet for me is a seer - the one who sees life in artistic, hypersensitive way. There is fantastic artwork included by Steve Viner, who illustrates also the children’s book I am currently in the process of writing. This children book is my main focus at the moment, although I am still writing poetry and articles, latest of which is on Sylvia Plath and will be published by Eviscerator Heaven and possibly also re-published by Osprey. Also I am working on short stories for another chapbook to be released by Shadow Archer Press. Another project is opening a website with my partner and some help by our very talented friends, this journal will be dedicated to art and its history and methods. It’s a very busy time and I am very hopeful that many of my dreams and ambitions will be realised and manifested within a foreseeable future.
And what is defined within me by poetry? I must admit this is a very difficult question to answer. Poetry for me crystallises the world within me that speaks with symbols and with dreams, the understanding of emotions and life in its broader context that escapes ‘normal’ language and 'normal' vision. If poetry defines something it is this unspeakable territory into the only language capable of showing it, articulating it, it helps me define that world, that space, with words. I guess again it is a reason why symbolist and surreal poetry is the kind of poetry that I prefer as a reader as well as writing it and the type of poetry that has defined me the most. Also poems with striking prosodies have an effect on me and define me as a word musician, which is a more forgotten function of poetry these days.
Read work by Petra Whiteley published in Counterexample Poetics HERE.
This interview took place electronically between April 11, 2009 and May 7, 2009.
