Robin Robertson Speaks With Rachel Cooke at The Guardian

Robertson is the author, most recently, of The Long Take. In conversation with Rachel Cooke, he talks about his writing and his work as an editor at Jonathan Cape. In her introduction, Cooke writes, "Robin Robertson is an acclaimed poet who has won all three of the Forward poetry prizes. His latest work, The Long Take, a narrative poem, is set in the years immediately after the second world war." From there: 

The story unfolds in New York, San Francisco and, most importantly, Los Angeles, and follows Walker, a traumatised D-day veteran from Nova Scotia, as he tries to piece his life together just as the American dream is beginning to fray at its edges. It was shortlisted for the Booker prize and, last month, won the Goldsmiths prize for fiction, awarded to works that “open up new possibilities for the novel form”. Robertson also works as an editor at Jonathan Cape, where he publishes, among many others, Michael Ondaatje, Alice Oswald and Adam Thorpe.

When you come to look back on this year, and the fact that what you took for a poem has been so celebrated as a novel, what will you think?
That it’s all been a terrible accident? It is rather dreamlike. But this confusion over genre. I’ve been asked about it a lot. It is a long narrative poem; I don’t want to apologise for that. However, it’s also sui generis. It has prose in it, too. It’s to do with how you propel narrative; with how you make the reader pay attention to particular aspects of the story. Writing it as I did allowed for more control over some of those techniques.

You’ve also said that, as you wrote, you didn’t know what you were doing…
That’s my other answer to the same question. It’s true. I was just aware that I wanted a bigger canvas. I wanted to address subjects the lyric form does not allow for, really. My poetry has tended to be examinations of the human in the natural world. I’ve always neglected the city. In The Long Take, I’m trying to go back to the ambivalence I felt when I moved from Aberdeen to London in the late 70s, to the odd sensations of the seething metropolis. There are the usual excitements: escape, anonymity and glamour. But the flipside is loneliness and fear. You start seeing all the things the city tries to hide: the squalor, corruption and crime. In the poem, the city is almost a character. It’s certainly an adversary.

Read their complete conversation at The Guardian.