New interview in Swedish newspaper
Dagens Nyheter, somewhat clunkily Google-translated (do we have a Swede here?):
PJ Harvey: My mother has always been very important to meSince the 90's, she has explored man's darker drives and conflicts on record. Now PJ Harvey has written the long poem "Orlam", about growing up and about the eternal war. In an exclusive interview, DN's Johanna Paulsson talks to the British artist who has retrained as a poet.What makes a musician start writing poetry?
It should turn out to be war, but we will return to it.
As a songwriter, PJ Harvey has long explored themes such as sexuality, religion and politics with a special sense of the mysterious and the macabre. The features are repeated in the new book "Orlam", a long poem that takes place in a sphere of magical realism. The story is about nine-year-old Ira-Abel who, not unlike the author, grows up on a sheep farm and stands on the threshold of an adult world that may seem both familiar and frightening.
- Because I wanted to use the child's voice, it was natural to write based on a child's imaginative imaginary world that lies somewhere between sleep and wakefulness, real and fictional, life and death, explains Polly Jean Harvey as she is actually called from a black screen.
We are supposed to see each other on Zoom, but at the last minute the publisher announces that it will be a conversation without video. At one point, it suddenly becomes so quiet that I have to ask if she is still there or if the internet connection is down. PJ Harvey does not waste words unnecessarily. Sometimes it may sound as if she is stopping in the middle of a thought so as not to reveal too much. But the enigma feels like a genuine personality trait rather than image.
And all her mystery dwelled within her black hair, Nick Cave sang in a song that is supposed to be about her. The two musicians were a couple in the 90's, but today PJ Harvey's private life is all the more secret.
It is of course as a rock star she is most well-known and as such she has undeniably managed to cultivate the myth of herself. Not infrequently with such sincerity that her songs were perceived as autobiographical, even though they were about mutilating a lover or killing a child. Already on the debut album
Dry (when the name PJ Harvey was still synonymous with her band's name), she consolidated a distinctive singing style over an unmistakably dark and twisted rock sound. The crooked, distorted guitars met with blues and biblical references on the breakthrough
To Bring You My Love in 1995.
During the 2000s, the musical rawness has been gradually toned down in favor of a more salon-sophisticated appearance. But the lyrics have continued to rub in a way that really should not be possible for such a best-selling artist.
A prerequisite for PJ Harvey's success is perhaps precisely her ability to repeatedly reinvent herself, as cryptic as uncompromising in her expression. I interviewed her in Stockholm eleven years ago and can on my part recall a body language as reserved as her way of speaking. Then she had just released her eighth album
Let England shake, where she with her new softer sound met brutal depictions from the battlefield. The album is in a way also the key to the book
Orlam.
"Poetry and English literature were my favorite subjects already in high school and I have read a lot all my life, but it was in connection with the creation of
Let England shake that I became increasingly interested in poetry", says PJ Harvey.
It was an album that addressed, among other things, British imperialism and linked historical battles with modern conflicts. During the course of her work on it, she read poems by the poets of the First World War, but became so engrossed in the craft itself that she decided to take a poetry course and eventually take her writing to a higher level.
Orlam is thus far from an idle live musician's pandemic project. In fact, she has been working on the book for eight years under the mentorship of the Scottish poet Don Paterson, who also teaches at the University of St Andrews. As early as 2015, PJ Harvey's first collection of poems
The Hollow of the Hand came out, a collaboration with the photographer and filmmaker Seamus Murphy, with whom she visited a still war-torn Kosovo, Afghanistan and the class divisions of Washington DC.
The field trips and the recording of the socially engaged album
The Hope Six Demolition Project are also depicted in SVT Play's current documentary
A Dog Called Money. Against this background, one may consider
Orlam a homecoming rather than some form of Brexit craze for regional culture. PJ Harvey describes it in terms of "scaling down".
"I had explored the current world situation in all these outward-looking, large-scale projects and was in urgent need of returning to the small-scale. To the small world and the person inside. That is how this book began", says PJ Harvey and at the same time believes that the small village can be seen as a "microcosm" of the world at large.
The difference between writing lyrics and poetry was much greater than she could ever have imagined.
"Lyrics can be a very vague brushstroke. It does not require many details because the music does half the work and fills in the mood or feeling you want to convey. A poem, on the other hand, is just words on a piece of paper and must contain all the information you want to reach the reader with. You can use the verse form to help, write rhyming or unrhymed. But every word counts so you have to be extremely specific."
Nevertheless, music also plays an important role in
Orlam. A passage is, for example, written to be sung to the melody "My Favorite Things" from the musical
The Sound of Music. The Elvis lyric "Love me tender" appears repeatedly, as do references to Pink Floyd and Moody Blues, as well as the American hymn.
"Children often sing songs. At least I did. Such as children's songs or any song we heard on TV that made an impression on us. It felt logical for this nine-year-old to sing and write her own little songs."
The slightly eerie atmosphere in "Orlam" makes me think of one of your early songs, "Down by the Water" from the album To Bring You My Love. Is it just my personal association or are they in some way related, in themes such as sexuality, upbringing and a religious imagery, along with something very dark and scary?"No, I would not make a direct comparison with that song except possibly to highlight how I in my lyrics always lived in other characters. If we take "Down by the water" then you know that I have never had a daughter nor drowned her in a river."
The interesting thing about exactly what you mention is that I interpret the text differently now that I have read Orlam. At the end of the book, for example, one realizes that what dies is childhood rather than the child."Oh, that was nice to hear! I would never have made that connection myself, but now that you say it, I clearly see that possibility. That's what I love about a work of art, that the viewer or reader makes their own interpretation based on their own experiences. That's where the beauty of art lies, I think."
Since the breakthrough in the mid-90s, PJ Harvey has moved between the big city and the British south coast.
Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea is also the name of one of her most successful albums, which was awarded the Mercury Prize in 2001. An award she received over the phone from a hotel room in Washington DC, on the same day as the September 11 attacks.
PJ Harvey grew up in Dorset County and lives only 30 minutes away from her parents' home, where her mother still lives. Her name is Eva Jean and she has assisted with the proofreading. But above all, it was she who early on encouraged PJ Harvey and her brother to live out their imagination by drawing, making their own puppets and playing theater.
"My mother has always been very important to me. I value her views and see her as a very intelligent, open and creative person", says PJ Harvey who, like many other musicians, also has an art school background.
PJ Harvey: Unplucked was the headline when she received the music magazine NME in 1993 on the family farm in Corscombe and posed on the cover with a (live and unplucked) hen in her arms. Nowadays, PJ Harvey divides her time between the countryside and the apartment in London, where she is currently located. The West Country of her own upbringing - the loosely defined area in the south-west of England - has of course characterized the environments in
Orlam, although the depiction is far from autobiographical.
"I think that all artists borrow from their own experiences. It is necessary to have a foundation to stand on", she states, jokes that her accent is still heard in certain words and tells briefly about a "wonderful childhood" with great freedoms and a lot of outdoor play.
Animals and nature are constantly present in the book as well, as is the superstition of older times. The poem follows the months of the year and the footnotes are packed with folklore and other material in the style of "Bondepraktikan". Everything written in the Dorset dialect is also "translated" into standard English on every other page. At the back is a glossary based on the 19th century poet and linguist William Barnes'
Glossary of the Dorset dialect. Anyone who has read the
Harry Potter books recognizes at least one of the local words: dumbledore, which means bumblebee.
"I am deeply interested in etymology, in how language arises and how it is passed on through oral tradition", says PJ Harvey and carefully explains the book title's own etymology.
The fictitious word
Orlam is derived from the name Mallory-Sonny. This is the name of the bottle clam that in the story was killed by a flock of roe deer and whose eye is now watching over Ira-Abel. It also refers specifically to the eyeball itself and is related to "ocular".
The text itself is characterized by a dynamic between tradition and transgression, between innocence and perversion, folk beliefs and religious symbolism. Likewise, PJ Harvey lets different eras flow together or color each other. What she wanted to explore is both the past and the future, but above all the way in which they are connected to each other in the present. Through the forest and the sides, the ghost of a soldier named Wyman-Elvis wanders, reminiscent of how the world is constantly haunted by war.
"It felt important for me to have the character Wyman-Elvis as the bleeding soldier with his neck cut. He is in a way a figure of Christ and as you say a reminder of a constant state of war."
We get into the horrific images that are currently being wired out of war-torn Ukraine.
"I think we all right now feel extremely upset and frustrated. We want to help, but in what way can we help? Nothing feels enough. That something like this can and will continue to happen is shocking and absolutely awful."
Do you feel the need to process the war in Ukraine artistically?
"I'm not entirely sure. When we are in the middle of an ongoing situation, it is sometimes difficult to put it into words or understand it right then. It can take several years to process."
So it was also when she was hit by the news broadcasts about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which became the origin of
Let England Shake.
"I have to be strongly affected by something to want to devote several years of writing to it", she states.
PJ Harvey has also already recorded a new album which will be released next year, but she does not want to reveal much more than that. Now, poetry readings are awaiting at literature festivals around Europe.
"Then, when I'm finished with them, I'll start writing my next book and slowly figure out what it's about. It will surely take me another eight years."
Source:
https://www.dn.se/kultur/p-j-harvey-min ... g-for-mig/
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