Julian Kanagy: I'd love to start by asking directly about some key aspects of 'Out of Time,' specifically the setting of the poem and the core concepts it explores.
Oliver Smith: ‘Out of Time’ is set in a very specific location. When I was growing up, ‘Uncle’ Roger had at least two sheds, which stood in his garden just west of the Cross Hands roundabout in Brockworth where the A38 (Ermin Street) crossed the A46. This was a major freight route which has since been bypassed, but then was full of lorries.
Roger and ‘Aunty’ Mary had a large detached house and a big garden that stood at the end of the cul-de-sac where I lived. I think they came from a farming family and had a lot of traditional knowledge and practical skills – I remember Mary curing a ramshorn in saltpetre, preserving apples (from their trees) for the winter, and making faggots from a bagful of offal. Their sheds filled were with the most fascinating things (for me as a child) – tools and craft materials and traditional sports gear. Their son, Simon, would occasionally come fishing with me and used his father’s beautiful split cane rods that had obviously been preserved a long time in the shed; you couldn’t have bought them in a shop in 1978; fishing rods then were mostly fibre glass and I think carbon fibre was just being introduced.
The core concept was being ‘out of time’. The poem references musical time signatures; this was inspired by Maartin Alcock’s tune ‘The Cat on the Mixer’ recorded by Fairport Convention on the album ‘Expletive Delighted’ (1986). The score appeared in the Cropredy Festival programme around that year and I was struck by the way it is notated in multiple time signatures. This is why the music is not twos or threes or fours or fives or sevens.
There is an obvious double meaning of the title that the music is out of time and that Merlin is out of his time; in the present day. The carp rod, the woodworking techniques are all anachronisms, and the poem ends by running, “Out of Time”.
The poem references several musical instruments; “the pipe that keened and the trumpets blown” so these martial instruments; (bag) pipe and trumpets, are stored away but those old voices (ancestors, ghosts, memories?) encourage him to play (domestic) fiddle, but then undercut this with the invitation to play the barbaric and magical ‘man-skin drum’. This is borrowed from Gustav Meyrink’s novel Walpurgisnach (1917). I thought there was some resonance here with the story of a large piece of, supposedly, Viking skin nailed to the door of St Botolph’s church in Hadstock near Cambridge; it was eventually DNA tested and wasn’t actually a person (New Scientist 21 April 2022).
The past bubbles up out of the British landscape; medieval furrows are visible under cattle fields, Saxon boundary walls and ditches run through the woods and every other hill was once an ancient British hillfort. These are rather better protected than the more recent ruins; the monuments that have largely disappeared but loomed large when I was growing up were the various concrete fortifications left over from WW2. The poem views the present as not just haunted by lost pasts, but haunted by lost futures too.
Julian Kanagy: What brought you to use Merlin for the narrative voice, here?
Oliver Smith: I’m sure as a child I was exposed to a lot of Arthurian myths. I’m interested in how myths are mapped onto landscapes; near where I live there is a small wood called Purgatory and a hamlet called Paradise; there is a Merlin’s Cave and a King Arthur’s Cave close by in the Forest of Dean.
The depiction is influenced by ‘Merlin’ by Simon Nye (Bantam Books, 1981) where Merlin only remembers the future but forgets his past – so Merlin lives out of time.
Julian Kanagy: I found the Arthurian allusions to be a really interesting way to characterize the shelving of enchantment in a world too new and fast-paced to make time for whimsy.
Oliver Smith: A lot of my prose writing has taken the mythological and mapped it onto a Gloucestershire or west country landscape; quite a few of these prose pieces are collected in ‘Basilisk Soup and other fantasies’. In the title story Gawain and the Green Knight (the first part) is transposed onto the Black Horse pub in Cranham.
Julian Kanagy: In 'Out of Time' and some of your other poems, I had the sense of wistful change, of aging in place while surroundings change, and of an essential connection to landscape. Would you agree with this characterization of your work at large? Or do you find any of those compelling elements to explore with writing?
Oliver Smith: I think when we are young, we have far more ‘peak experiences’ that stick with us, that continue to haunt us, it’s when we are experiencing things for the first time and our brains are still forming.
Memory is fragmentary with a lot of filling in after the fact. Some confabulation is necessary to bridge those gaps; the mythic elements in my poems helps fill these narrative holes, to make sense of the fragments. If there is an elegiac mood, I think it is a result of the writing structuring a lot of the emotionally resonant images.
There is an aesthetic consideration there too; I want an emotional intensity in my poetry – it’s part of what poetry does and what it’s good at. Poems are more information rich than prose, but ironically this also makes their meaning more slippery; alongside the obvious metaphors, rhythm, rhyme, and rhetoric press all sorts of emotional buttons, subjecting the reader to a form of entrainment, enchantment, or transportation. Perhaps, I think nostalgia is quite destructive – I’ve read a lot of history and most of the past is pretty grim. If we’re lucky we can learn from it, if not we just repeat it. One of my favourite books is ‘Lucky Jim’ by Kingsley Amis (1954), where Amis shreds the idea of ‘Merry England’ that was current. The fifties now also seem to be perceived as some sort of English idyll – it never stops.
Julian Kanagy: Could you speak to your relationship with formal structure in your poetry generally, and in 'Out of Time' in particular?
Oliver Smith: In my Creative Writing, I use methods originating in Surrealism. I employ cut-up and other aleatory disruptions, borrow text taken from previous works, use automatic writing, free association. Sometimes I will assemble word lists, combining discourses such as limnology, geology, natural history, Kabala, Tarot, recipes for soup, and science fiction. To continue I cut it into pieces; fragment it, disrupt it, and restructure then repeat until it is cooked.
I use cut up method a lot at the start of my process, there is a lot of entropy in the early iterations of the poems and one of the strategies I use as a foil to this is to impose a formal structure. This won’t necessarily remain in the finished version, for example ‘Holes’ recently published in Radon Journal is in free verse.
In ‘Out of Time’ I have ended up with something approaching iambic pentameter and quintains (the metre varies a bit on the last lines and some of the these seem more like spondees than Iambs i.e. ‘sack/ cloth, / draped’ and ‘man/skin/ drum’
I usually experiment with metre and stanza length until I find a form suites the poem. I wanted this poem to be rhythmic but not too obviously rhymed. I tend to look for half rhymes at line ends and use stronger internal rhymes.
There are various rhetorical strategies I regularly employ; these are also somewhat random in that I have various rhetorical devices printed on a set of cards and pick a few from the pile to try out. By the end of this process; confabulation, formal structuring, rhetorical devices, I’m usually a long way from the fragmentary origins of the poem.
In the end what mattes to me is how it sounds when read aloud. I’ll often use reading software so I can hear the poem in neutral voice; if it sounds ok with a robot reading it, it should be ok with a human doing it.
Julian Kanagy: Our editors found the texture of your words and the specificity of your imagery compelling. Would you care to speak to how growing up in Gloucestershire informs your connection to some of the images you use? I particularly thought viewing the A38 as "slithering and serpentine...creeping like a dragon down the hill" a fascinating image, bringing back the fantastical alongside the modern development.
Oliver Smith: I think those poems are never far from folk-horror. While I was spending school holidays running feral in Gloucestershire woods and hills there was a serial killer touring the county in a builder’s van.
The A38 follows the Roman Ermin Street so is only relatively new when compared with some of the green lanes or the Salt Way. One of those new things it brought was the Legio II Augusta to establish Gloucester in AD97. Of course, roman roads were notoriously straight but, this one gets very wiggly as it ascends the Cotswold escarpment.
What else would Merlin compare a road snaking down the hill to but a Dragon? after all it must have been a peak experience of his youth, when Vortigern threatened sprinkle his blood on the foundations to stop his new castle falling down and young Merlin showed him a vision of two dragons battling beneath it for possession of Britain. See The Prophecy of the Red Dragon and White Dragon in Nennius for the full story.
Oliver Smith
Oliver Smith is a visual artist and writer from Cheltenham, UK. He is inspired by Tristan Tzara, J. G. Ballard, and Max Ernst; by the poetry of chance encounters, by frenzied rocks towering above the silent swamp; by unlikely collisions between place and myth and memory. His poetry has been published in ‘Abyss & Apex’, ‘Ink, Sweat, and Tears’, ‘Strange Horizons’ and ‘Sylvia Magazine’ and has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He holds a PhD in Literary and Critical Studies from the University of Gloucestershire. For more information see his website: https://oliversimonsmithwriter.wordpress.com/
Julian Kanagy
Julian Kanagy is a Chicago-based poet and editor. His poetry samples a Midwestern upbringing peppered with loss and abandonment, thrives both in the confines of formal structure and the simplicity of its absence, and expands into an ongoing search for the beauty in everyday life when it seems to be hiding. He started Heirlock Magazine to amplify underrepresented voices and The Wild Umbrella to celebrate writing for writing's sake; both as an editor and in his own work, Julian follows the advice of a mentor: “find the poems that nobody else could have written.”
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