Zélie and Philip Gross
Dancing with the Spirit
Rowena Loverance talks to an acclaimed Quaker poet
‘Now, let’s have a barn dance!’ Not, you might think, the most obvious opening for outreach, but this was the line which Philip Gross credits with starting him on the road to Friends. It was his first time in a Meeting house, sometime in the early 1970s, at the end of a college friend’s Quaker wedding, and the chairs were being moved out of the way. ‘There was an astonishing feeling of people being in a circle, equal with each other’. When, over a decade later, Philip took his daughter to her first dancing class in a similar room, a different Meeting house, it felt somehow familiar. ‘I might always have been doing a dance with the Spirit.’
When he won the TS Eliot Poetry Prize last month for The Water Table, Philip Gross parachuted into the front line of British poets. The names of former winners such as Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney and Carol Ann Duffy have been liberally sprinkled around. ‘What does it feel like’, I asked, ‘for a Quaker suddenly to find themselves famous?’ ’Delighted’, came the reply, with, I thought, commendable Quaker plain-speaking. ‘It gives my work the oxygen of good attention’.
Philip uses the word ‘attention’ a lot. To write poetry is to concentrate one’s attention. Poetry is a shape made out of words and silence; to write it one has to make space in which things can resonate, and then find out what comes back in the echoes. The reader, too, has to offer the right sort of attention. But that’s not supposed to be off-putting – ‘it’s not some kind of test, there’s no examining board in the sky’. The invitation to the reader is to join in and play in the space that the poem creates. When we bring our own response to it, then ‘the poem becomes more than I intended. It has left home’.
A Quaker Meeting too, of course, is made out of words and silence. How does Philip’s writing inform his worship, I wondered? ‘Writing poetry is like listening; it’s not just about ministry. It’s like being both parts of a Quaker Meeting’. And the ministry part is not just self-expression: ‘Even if I knew what the “me” is that I’m expressing, why would I want to do that? I assume that I’m always taking part in a conversation’.
This is clearly true on several levels. Philip is a teacher as well as a poet: for years he’s run writing workshops in schools and he’s currently professor of creative writing at Glamorgan University. With his wife Zélie, he leads art and poetry courses at Woodbrooke, ‘not studying it but doing it’. This year’s course will be called ‘Written in Water’: appropriately, as the lake, we agreed, is at the heart of Woodbrooke. He collaborates with other artists, pairing his poems with paintings of Britain’s ancient stone circles or, most recently, with photographs of electricity pylons (I Spy Pinhole Eye with photographer Simon Denison). ‘I value the kind of work which isn’t completely owned by me,’ he says, ‘which evolves in the space between us.’
It was ten years or so after the dancing class experience before Philip actually joined Friends; now, having at first resisted Quaker history, he’s finding himself needing to know more about it, so as to make sense of Quaker language. This may or may not turn into a children’s novel, yet another facet of his work. In the meantime, he’s wrestling with the challenge of early Friends. ‘If a person temperamentally like me had been dropped into a period like that, would I have been drawn to be a Quaker then?
Would I have been as extreme, as sheer bloody-minded?’
Philip Gross will be speaking about and reading from The Water Table and I Spy Pinhole Eye at the Quaker Centre, Friends House on Wednesday 24 February at 6.00 pm.
Comments
Interesting. I’m hoping to come on 24th Feb.
By applebyc on 14th February 2010 - 15:50
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