Interview with Paul Grimsley, Author of A Suite of Desolate Elegance

If I were to sum Paul Grimsley up in one word it would be "amazing." But, even that word doesn't do justice to the man himself. I discovered this about Paul some time ago by reading his work (I recommend that if you haven't you should) and then meeting him in person. Those who know Paul can grasp what I mean by these words and those who have read his work will be interested to hear what I have discovered. Unfortunately all you get today is this interview.

Many have witnessed Paul pump out poetry as if his mind was a constant conveyor belt shooting out images, ideas, metaphor, similes, and crazy rhymes that baffle, fascinate, shock, amaze, and even anger at rates that rival the speed of light. But under all of that genius is the most genuine person one could ever come to know.

My first impression of Paul was that he was an arrogant prick. I soon discovered that to be the farthest thing from the truth. I have never met anyone who was more in tune with what it means to be human, who could express it so well. Through working with Paul I discovered how easily he relates, and can be related to.

The first question I asked Paul was: Where did Paul Grimsley grow up?

I chuckled in my mind when he answered the question in third person, but Paul always pays attention. He has a subtle way about him that is everything you need him to be, while at the same time maintaining a style completely his own, and a character that is so far from contrived it's not even in the same book.

PG: He was born in Sudbury, a town famous for birthing Thomas Gainsborough the artist. He then proceeded to mature at an alarming rate in a small town called Clare which was akin to a necropolis except for the corpses having the rudimentary distinctions which mark them out as being alive -- walking around and having a pulse. He escaped only recently but had traveled around for a while.

WW: How do you feel your upbringing has influenced your writing, if at all?

PG: Mainly in a reactionary way. I was a born cynic -- as all great thinkers tend to be. Not that I think of myself as such -- I occasionally strike it lucky. But small town small minds and ultra-conservative attitudes tend to mix with questioning intellects like oil with water -- we were destined to separate early on. I stuck out like the proverbial sore thumb and getting the shit kicked out of you on a regular basis tends to drive you to safer climes -- namely the local library and my bedroom where I spent time drawing and reading and gathering a head full of esoteric knowledge from an early age.

WW: When did you first decide you were inclined to write, and what was your earliest motivation?

PG: I started off mainly with art as the driving force in my creative life, mixing up the so-called highbrow with the lowbrow -- drawing comics and such, creating characters and then writing stories around them. I suppose the shift came when I started studying literature seriously around 18 though I had been writing for my whole life up until that point. But 18 was where I first started to consider the work I was producing as having some kind of value. I wrote the same teenage shit that everyone writes; Jim Morrison birthed a billion bad poets -- but I read in a fashion that is referred to as metatextual reading -- so I found other people through him and discovering T S Eliot's the wasteland was a pivotal moment for me: it changed everything thereafter.

WW: Who are some of your more recent influences?

PG: Eliot is ever present in my mind, as is Plath. I was massively into Seamus Heaney for a while and W H Auden. I hadn't read any of Bukowski's poetry until recently but that chimed with me. Strangely a lot of the main influences in my writing are prose writers -- Kafka and Saul Bellow and the beat writers such as Kerouac and Burroughs, and along with them Aldous Huxley and Ray Bradbury played a big role. I stopped reading for a while because I was worried about things impacting too much on my consciousness so I turned to listening to music and looking at art as a way to disconnect my head from the daily hum-drum and get me into that mind state where I could unhook the logical side and free up the creative side.

WW: What style(s) do you use, and what is the most comfortable?

PG: I use mainly free-verse I suppose, though I rhyme more than most. I think I have an innate sense of where the rhythm of a line works; I have tried to explain to people that iambics are purely a formalized version of the inflection native English speakers put on their words. People mistake lack of capitals, lack of punctuation, etc, as indication that I am not au fait with the use of either tool. Perhaps it is an arrogant thing to move away from traditional forms but the thing is, those footsteps you are following in are made in snow and snow melts. What do you do when they are all melted away and you can't find your way back? You have to evolve. Sometimes the old forms are the literary equivalent of speaking in a dead language -- pretty and decorative but at heart sadly irrelevant. So yeah free verse, informed by traditional forms. Rhyming sometimes, sometimes not. Perhaps if I call it bastardized poetry -- or Heinz poetry. I never entirely agreed with the whole Duchamp assertion that art is whatever the artist says it is -- that is a bullshit cop-out. Form serves content, content shapes form -- it is a reciprocal dynamic that works its way through my thinking in every piece of writing.

WW: That's kind of a dichotomy, Paul, and though I can understand what you mean by it, do you often get a fair amount of critique about it, and if so, how do you handle it?

PG: People who criticize the work tend to take the angle that you should be obeying some stupid fucking template that they have in their head of what a good poem is. I sometimes think it is a case of if you have to ask you'll never know. I wrote something called 'colour-coding bullshit for the blind' and though I can't recall entirely if that was aimed at the ones who want to be spoon-fed, who want that facile dot-to-dot poetry where they have to work as hard as a dyslexic with an abc reader, it sums up my attitude. If the criticism is valid; or if not valid at least derived from some consideration, then I take it in good faith. Come to a poem and try to hammer its square peg into your round hole and then complain because it doesn't fit, then I am flipping you the bird, either behind your back or in a poem if I consider it worth a reply

WW: What do you think has been the most evolutionary period of your writing?

PG: Since January last year when I first started regularly posting on writing sites -- I wrote over 1000 pieces and had a few things published, I started traveling in the US and attending readings and getting genuine feedback from people. Before that I think I had evolutionary spurts but without someone there to confirm what is just a gut feeling a lot of what you are doing is just masturbatory

WW: You've been traveling around the US quite a lot lately, and have come in contact with quite a diverse variety of people, some who write and others who don't. How do you feel about the different uses of the English language that you have come in contact with in your travels, and have the different cultures inspired you, or affected you in any way?

PG: I find it all fascinating -- I think I have a good ear for accents and there are subtle differences even within the same place -- different cadences that have a heritage all of their own. The thing is most people nowadays live in the USA in some notional way -- the culture has been mass-exported. There is that whole thing of being close to America culturally with coming from the UK and that is something where the gap is closing even more significantly and at an increasingly rapid rate. So it wasn't the culture shock most might believe. But yeah, even bearing the similarities in mind; the differences are evident and throw up a lot to write about.

WW: How do you feel about the literary world today?

PG: I think a lot of the old institutes that one had to rely on for the dissemination of "art" are dead in the water -- run by soulless suits with no fucking clue about how to find their own dicks with both hands let alone possessing the wherewithal to spot a decent writer. The small presses and print-on-demand are the so-called bleeding edge -- it has leveled the playing field. When everyone has the means to distribute their work and the dinosaurs truly become extinct it may finally become some kind of meritocracy instead of some mass circle-jerk where all the soft-brained hacks and washed-up corpses of once great writers keep getting repackaged with deodorant and pretty bows as if they are still relevant

WW: Many of the best and most influential writers/ artists have displayed great inner passions through their art. Do you have any serious emotions, passions, or opinions that you feel become expressed more often in your work, and if so, could you point some of them out?

PG: I said to someone recently that they write in a simple way to express complexity and that I write in a complex way to express simplicity. I like to approach things from an oblique angle. My interests range from quantum physics to jazz music and everything in between. I tend to react against my own work so if I am writing a lot of love poetry fro instance which is simple and direct I may counter that with some complex abstract piece that is barely penetrable on the first read. I suppose my main passion is the location of the human mind within the universe and every permutation and ramification of that. Love is, as with a lot of romantics, also a preoccupation.

WW: How do you feel technology has influenced today's writers, and yourself?

PG: It shouldn't affect the writing process much in my opinion. That whole Truman Capote thing about some people being writers and others being typists. The only thing it should revolutionize is distribution. But it is naive to believe it wouldn't impact at all. Some of the sites in existence and the way they are set up perhaps require a degree of re-focusing so that they get back to an essential idea that they have strayed from. On the whole it is a good thing. We live in the world Marshal McLuhan envisioned. We live in a world Bill Gates has his fingerprints all over. There are things to fight against. But being human is essentially the same so being a writer should be too.

WW: Is there any style or idea that you haven't tried and would like to pursue in the future?

PG: I think I have tried a fair few of them but I am always looking to change on a daily basis -- anything that allows me to communicate something new is worth having a crack at. I know that isn't very specific but I tend to do all this writing thing on an intuitive basis so second guessing myself can to some degree engender a state where the only thing that is possible is block.

WW: Are you currently working on any publishing projects or ideas that the rest of us fans can look forward to seeing in the future?

PG: I have several book ideas in mind for my poetry. I am in a new e-book anthology that the site www.editred.com is putting out. I am writing novels in various genres and obviously turning out poems by the day.

WW: Is there anything that you think you might need to work on or change about your own work? Self pet peeves, perhaps?

PG: My prose is something that I want to focus on more -- especially the novels. Some people have block; I have what Stephen King, I think it was, referred to as bloat -- too many ideas. Focus is the watchword. I work on a periodic basis to strip out and re-tool my image bank so that my writing stays fresh. Keep acting and reacting and evolving -- that is the key. If you ever make the mistake of thinking you know everything there is to know then you may as well take an axe to your work because it will die as quickly as your forward momentum.

WW: Are there any trends that you've noticed that you'd like to comment on, anything you are impressed with, or would like to see burned?

PG: Not that I advocate book-burning but perhaps I can recommend tossing Andrew Motion, the English poet laureate, on a bonfire and use Dean Koontz as a fire lighter. I think the thing with trends nowadays is that they tend to be artificially created by some guy with a trendy haircut and a Lego attitude to art. And movements die as quickly as they are born because the originals get fucked over by their photocopies who proliferate like slightly skewed cancer cell versions of them that kill any enthusiasm. I tend to steer clear of trends and leave them for the sheep.

WW: What's your favorite word?

PG: monadnock

WW: Meaning?

PG: It is a pillar of rock that stands alone -- like the ultimate hard-on

WW: Have you ever read anything that made you cry?

PG: The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold -- it is a beautiful book and If This is a Man by Primo Levi

WW: What was the worst book you've read?

PG: Pride and Prejudice -- I fucking hate Jane Austen -- I should have mentioned her when I was talking about burning things. Try studying her for English literature two times in a row with English teachers talking about her subtle humour and then try not wanting to invent a time machine just to go back in time and run her over. Oh, and Northanger Abbey too.

WW: What are you currently reading?

PG: Rant by Chuck Palahniuk. Forced Entries, the sequel to Basketball Diaries. Factotum by Bukowski. My Capricorn Friend by Henry Miller. Dark Tower 5 by Stephen King. Slouching Toward Nirvana by Bukowkski and some others I can't recall.

WW: If it were up to you, what would be on the list for required reading for literary students of today?

PG: Grapes of Wrath, Shakespeare, Saul Bellow's Dangling Man, Ham on Rye by Bukowski, the Glass Bead Game and the Prodigy by Herman Hesse; poetry wise I would say Plath, Eliot, Auden, Carlos Williams, Pablo Neruda, etc

WW: If you were a literary messenger with one book to pass on to every new person you met, what would it be?

PG: The next one I am going to publish

WW: If you were going to be locked in a cell for the rest of your life, and could only read one author, who would you choose?

PG: Joseph Conrad

WW: Any advice to those new to the game?

PG: Listen to all the advice given and then disregard it. Read lots. And never ever buy one of those stupid fucking how to books -- they are the equivalent of a frontal lobotomy. You learn to write by writing.

WW: Is there anything else you'd like to share? Anything I haven't covered?

PG: Hmm, just that it is great to be arrogant to a degree when it comes to self-belief in your work but humility is the key to not only being a good person but a great writer. Too much arrogance kills brain cells. Also if you can't engage with people how in the hell do you think you are ever going to be able to write convincingly about them. Burn your how-to books - just wanted to re-iterate that.

I want to thank Paul for just being Paul, even through this interview, I have grown more fascinated by his mind (and I read his new works religiously before the proverbial ink has dried). I'd like to reiterate that if you haven't checked out his work, you should. You can find 'a suite of desolate elegance,' on Amazon.com and Lulu.com. If you do check it out and don't "get it." shoot yourself in the face, you are officially no longer viable. I want to end this interview by quoting some lines from one of my favorite poems by Paul called requirements for messiah status

"i want my jesus to have crawled across shared needles and eaten shit
defecation in trade for deification in this motherfucking household buddy
twist your rosary kaleidoscope samsara throat to squeeze out zen koan juice
and then act like you carried the heart of robert the bruce on your crusades
i do not want someone to love me for the fix of fixing; fuck your fixative
i learned to live under the cigarette burns of authenticity long before pity
and i will eat fifteen last suppers while you are polishing off your wafer"