More-than-human: A Poem and Interview From Jack houston

Interview by Glyn F. Edwards

Welcome to a new interview in our series on writing the #MoreThanHuman, a set of interviews with poets and writers on how they approach writing about the environment. The more-than-human is a phrase that seeks to side-step traditional nature-culture dualisms, and draw attention to the unity of all life as a kind of shared commonwealth existing on a fragile planet. It also reminds us humans that there is more to life, that there is more world, than the human; it relocates us in relation to the mystery.

This week’s interview features an urban-based poet writing about nature, Jack Houston, whose poetry has appeared in The Butcher’s Dog, Finished Creatures, Poetry London, The Rialto, Stand, The TLS, and in a debut pamphlet, The Fabulanarchist Luxury Uprising (Emma Press). Their Lockdown Poetry Workshop can be joined for free by emailing jack.houston@hackney.gov.uk.

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NIGHTJAR

You can find a Google Doc accessible version of this poem here.

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Glyn F. Edwards: In ‘Nightjar’, the ‘dad’ is both bumper-car driver and naturalist to the speaker? Is this poem a work of fiction, or does it describe a similar relationship in your life?

Jack Houston: Like many poems ‘Nightjar’ is a mix of the real and the imagined. It’s based on an actual event, a nightjar resting on the branches of our nearby nature reserve. We saw a small crowd, just like in the poem, as we were walking there, which we do often as it’s so close to our flat in Clapton (also in the poem). It’s the site of an old filter bed water-treatment plant, built in 1852, which took water from the River Lea and treated it to combat the cholera epidemics of the time. I really wanted to call my dad and tell him it was there as
he’s an avid twitcher. I didn’t. I can’t remember now why, but the wishing I had, I think, led
to the poem.

Glyn: The goals of the Sunday-league pitch are ‘empty’, the illusive nightjar is more ‘bark-marked’ than bird, even the filterbeds belong to the past. There are many references to loss in the poem, but is this nostalgia for a genuine time and place, or a series of ‘jolt(s)’ searching for something less tangible?

Jack: Arguably, loss is one of the main features of life. Among other things, we lose our youth, our looks, opportunities begin to dry up, our knees go, and then we die (I’m at about
stage four of this schematic). Sometimes we just lose the opportunity to tell our dad
there’s a bird in a tree. This all-encompassing sense of things slipping away being the
case, I guess a lot of what I write is tinged with loss, or if not loss then its potential. The
poem is perhaps an attempt to describe its speaker looking for something and not being
able to find it, or not finding anything tangible enough, at any rate.

Glyn: The naturalist George Monbiot describes the need for enchantment in nature as a ‘seam of intense emotion; buried so deeply in our minds that we seldom feel it’; the nightjar is one of the UK’s most enigmatic birds, and one of the few species capable of drawing a crowd to a tree in the dark. Although the speaker in ‘Nightjar’ is more fascinated by time with their father, have you encountered a similar ‘primal thrill’ with the more-than-human? And have you explored it in your poetry?

Jack: I have, with the nightjar in the poem! It really was surprisingly affecting. Though the speaker describes it, as I would have too, as ‘a small brown mound that doesn’t move’ the rarity of being so close to such an elusive creature was still magical. One of my favorite of my own poems, from (ahem) my Emma Press pamphlet, The Fabulanarchist Luxury Uprising, is ‘A collective Noun for the Robin’ and describes, not surprisingly, robins. It’s a love poem for my young family though, so not really about the more-than-human. Sorry.

Glyn: In choosing the next piece for your Lockdown Poetry Workshop, you decide to return to what has always been your favourite writing about the natural world. What poem would you choose, and what does it represent of the more-than-human that you
cherish?

Jack: I’m an urban poet by birth and have lived my whole life in east london, so I’m not naturally drawn to poems about the natural world as I find them sometimes difficult to map onto my lived experience. I did really like the entirety of Jason Allen-Paisant’s 2021 Carcanet collection Thinking With Trees however, as there he grappled more, at least it seemed to me, with questions of access and entitlement. For a single poem that mixes the natural with many other things I might choose Clare Pollard’s ‘In the City of Shiva’, which opens with a cow in a sari shop, before taking on the hindu pantheon, monkeys, fish, a boar, a pig and pigeons before the speaker becomes a mosquito. Phew! It’s from her 2011
Bloodaxe collection Changeling.