https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the ... oull-know/The More You Write, the Less You’ll KnowGregg LaGambina interviews PJ Harvey about her most recent book, album, and international tour.
Orlam by PJ Harvey. Picador. 320 pages.
IN ORLAM (2022)—a book-length, semi-autobiographical narrative poem, composed in Dorset dialect—we meet all sorts of unusual inhabitants who reside in the mythical village of Underwhelem. Adjacent to the very real Gore Woods in West Country England where its author, PJ Harvey, grew up and still keeps a home, Underwhelem is a nasty, funny, endlessly odd labyrinth tangled with tree roots, unusual flora, and wonderful words. It’s violent and beautiful and not unlike her early albums, in that you are simultaneously challenged and allured by what she has made, yet again.
Most of us learned about PJ Harvey through her songs, over the course of her 10 studio albums, and how each new collection bore almost no relation to the album that came before it. This was not done by design, as it turns out. She never calculates or consciously chooses to redefine herself. She doesn’t even consider herself to be a musician, but rather a conceptual artist. Everything she does, including Orlam, is the natural result of her insatiable appetite for knowing things she didn’t know before and turning them into art. In other words, she loves to learn.
She also loves to share. To fully experience and inhabit the world of Orlam, Harvey settled herself on an eight-year course that is still going. Both her newest album, I Inside the Old Year Dying (2023), and her accompanying tour across Europe and the United States are not just companions to the written work but are also necessary for us to fully inhabit the world she has created—in sight, sound, and verse.
In the conversation that follows, PJ Harvey shares her thoughts about the process of writing Orlam, creativity in general, what makes her want to make anything at all, and why death isn’t really that big of a deal.
GREGG LAGAMBINA: Maybe we can start by talking about what a day of working on Orlam looked like. PJ HARVEY: I wrote it over eight years, between London and Dorset. When I was in Dorset, I would spend a lot of time just being in nature, walking in the woods, and observing the seasons. Wherever I went, I’d always take my notepad with me, but I also did a lot of study as well. I studied Dorset folklore. I studied everything to do with the seasons. Everything from what flowers and trees were coming into leaf or fruiting to what insects were being born or dying. When I’d go out walking each month, I would walk within the month. I’d study the month and study what was going on in nature that month. And I would study the folklore surrounding the month. And then I would just go out walking with my notepad and let words come to me. I’d often write out four or five sides of paper. Sometimes a rhythm of a poem might start forming. And I’d write it very loosely, not worrying too much about the content, but trying to get the essence of the rhythm of the earth, or what I was trying to reach. Ideas would come to me just by walking.
I find that my intellectual brain is sharpest in the morning. Once I’ve started writing, I have a work practice. When you’re someone in the creative arts, you have to run your own schedule, or you never get anything done. Luckily, I do have quite a lot of self-discipline in that way. I would go to my desk and be there by 9:30 in the morning and work until 1:30 p.m. The afternoons were spent experimenting with musical ideas, or just getting out and about. As an artist, I think you need to go out into the world to observe and look at other people’s artworks—to just be present in the world.
When you first arrived in the public sphere as a musician, it was clear, from record to record, that you were not interested in repeating yourself. Orlam took years to compose, then you made its companion album (I Inside the Old Year Dying), and now you’re touring the United States with a stage design and wardrobe that is inspired by the Gore Woods you write about in your book. Have you ever spent this much time immersed in a thing of your own making?Well, like many artists—or performing artists, or musicians, even—I started off at art school. I was intending to earn a fine art degree and maybe specialize in sculpture. I was always a conceptual artist. At art school, you really have to explain why you’re making something and the reasoning behind it. I like that it has to have meaning. I have to need and want to say something with my work. I don’t like the word “conceptual,” but it is, you know? It’s got meaning behind it. It takes time to really explore what I’m looking for under the main idea that I’m working on, so it took a really long time to write Orlam. Then, it was a slow movement into song, and now into the live performance. It’s all part of the same project. It’s just different presentations, looking at it from different angles.
Even looking back to Rid of Me (1993), I knew exactly how I wanted it to sound. I knew exactly what I was trying to explore lyrically. I was very rigid about what I was going to do and what I wasn’t going to do. And if anyone tried to talk me into doing something else, I wasn’t going to do it, because I knew what I was doing. I’ve always been like that. The work develops into large projects that take a number of years. I’m just on this journey, really, and I need and love and have to do it. I don’t have to force myself. I’m just so genuinely curious about the world and trying to create music and words out of it.
A writer works mostly in solitude, but you have the unique opportunity to express these words you’ve written through your music to thousands of people at once. Has the experience of touring I Inside the Old Year Dying changed your poem in any meaningful way?When I was writing Orlam, I didn’t know it was going to become songs and music. I really didn’t. I was taking a break from music, because I’d returned from touring my last album, and I was becoming more and more interested in learning the skill of poetry writing. I was offered a mentorship course with the Scottish poet Don Paterson. I had met him because I’d been to some of his workshops. This was when I was writing Let England Shake (2011). I realized the subject matter for that record—war, current war, and past war—was such a gargantuan and difficult subject to write about that I knew I had to take great care with the words. I didn’t want to feel like I was standing on a soapbox, preaching to people, or giving a history lesson. It was very difficult to get right.
With Orlam, I was working hard at trying to become a better writer under Don’s guidance. It wasn’t about creating a book; the book grew out of the study I was doing with him. I had no intention for it to become an album or music. But toward the end of finishing the book, I began to fall in love with music again. My body and spirit were needing it, and I was finding myself playing more and more.
Like trying to get better at writing poems, I always practice piano, I practice guitar—I try to get better, because I was never schooled in any of these things. I didn’t study English; I didn’t study music. So, in some ways, I’m self-taught. Along the course of my life, I’ve been lucky enough to meet people who have given me guidance on that road. But I am self-taught, which has its drawbacks. It has great advantages too, in that there are no rules. You can invent your own language through music or through words. While I was practicing, trying to become a better pianist, I just found that I wanted to start singing, and the only the words that were deep in my system at the time were the words I was writing for Orlam.
How did you know, or arrive at, what Orlam sounded like?It took quite a while for us. I was working with producer Flood and John Parish, and it took a long time for us to feel our way into what this musical album could be. Obviously, it’s quite strange to be singing in Dorset dialect and inhabiting these different characters. We just all went into the studio with an open mind. I had the words, I had the rough outline of the chordal movements and a few melodies, and we basically improvised together while creating an atmosphere that felt right for the project. In one corner of the room, our co-worker Cecil was using lots of noises and samples that I’d made, found, or been given that had resonated with me while I was writing the book—natural sounds. He played them into the room in real time and we improvised on them. It could be anything from a birchwood in October to a strong wind blowing through barbed wire. He’d play these noises and John and I and Flood would play instruments into and around the way the noise was making us feel. I would start singing, and we crafted these songs [for the album I Inside the Old Year Dying] over five weeks.
It’s interesting to me that you don’t consider your own lyrics, across all 10 of your records, to be poetry. What does singing those early lyrics mean to you now, compared to these words that you’ve derived from your own poetry?For those early records—Dry (1992), Rid of Me—I was really interested in making a sound I felt I hadn’t heard before. Interested in it being confrontational, very black-and-white, shocking, and with very stark, minimalistic lyrics. They are underwritten, so the emotion came through my voice and the dynamics of the music. It was all much more musically based. To Bring You My Love (1995) was really the first time I became interested in grander themes and storytelling. You can see it in the narratives of those songs. I’m reaching out across vast deserts, vast open spaces, inhabiting characters writing from like 300 years ago.
It keeps changing, because as I grow as a person and read more and see more, it all informs me. And I always think that, as an artist, you absorb everything you see, read, taste, every person you meet, every piece of art that you see. It all sort of goes inside and is filtered through you. And what made you you. And what your life’s been like up to then. And it comes out in a new way.
So, your early lyrics were more about sound and attitude, less about precise words …I don’t believe you can just be a song lyricist and fall into being a poet. It’s an entirely different skill and it’s much, much harder. It requires a lot of work. The words have got to do everything on a blank page. You haven’t got music; you haven’t got lights or atmosphere. It’s just those words on a page being read, either in someone’s head or out loud, and you’ve got to make it work. I enjoy the challenge and it’s hard. It’s really hard. Poetry writing takes me a very long time and many, many disappointing days when I feel like I’m not getting anywhere. Songs and poems are very different. There’s a lot more information and dense language in poems, obviously. And they don’t always sing well. Sometimes the best songs have the simplest lyric. You don’t need much for a song.
Keats, Coleridge, Shakespeare, Elvis Presley, the Moody Blues, the Bible, Pink Floyd—somehow, you’ve borrowed from all of them for Orlam. If there’s an incantation that runs through the poem, it’s “love me tender.”
Yes, exactly.
Borrowing lines from “Nights in White Satin” is not something I would have expected to see when I started reading Orlam. It helps to remind us that this story takes place in the 1970s, but in some ways, you’re also collapsing time. What gives you the courage to take these risks? You’ve quoted the Moody Blues and rewritten the Lord’s Prayer in the same poem.[Laughs.] Well, I was very influenced by a small book of poems called Mercian Hymns (1971) by Geoffrey Hill. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that book, but within it, he inhabits the myth of Offa from what was Mercia, which I think is now Wales. He does it in all sorts of different ways. The poems are tiny, but at each one he’ll shift the narrative stance, he’ll shift the time. You’re never sure if you’re in the future or in the past. He completely collapses history. And sometimes the writing’s really anarchic and vulgar. Sometimes it’s hilarious; sometimes it’s heartbreaking. But that was a big influence on giving me the idea to be bold. It doesn’t matter. You have to maintain clarity, but I could collapse history, I could mix up all of these things just as it gets mixed up in the mind. Especially in a childlike mind.
I really enjoy mixing ancient names and ancient folklore with very modern things. Even peanut butter and banana sandwiches [Elvis’s reported favorite]. When I started writing poetry, I didn’t feel worthy to be doing it. I trod too carefully. I’m a bit bolder now and I can take some more risks.
There is a lot of humor in Orlam. I’m thinking about names for male anatomy (“porky sword”) and lusty farm boys straddling anything they can find in a field. When you released your first record, I had to go look up “Sheela-Na-Gig” because I had no idea what you were singing about. Do you have a particular interest in playing around with sexuality by using humor and folklore?It felt right for the work—for the age of the girl, and the older boys that she was hanging around with. In nature, you can see the cycle of fertility. You see the cycle of life. At certain times of the year, everything is mating, nesting, being born, dying. It’s the life cycle, of which sex is a part, but having fun with it, as you do when you’re a kid. You make up what you think are rude, funny, provocative jokes.
Orlam begins and ends with “Prayer at the Gate.” As a person who is well known for continual reinvention, I found these lines interesting: “So look before and look behind / at life and death all intertwined.” What is lurking behind you, considering you are a person who spends most of her time looking forward? Which, of course, leads me quite naturally to ask if you are afraid of death.No! [Laughs.] No, I’m not afraid of death. [Long pause.] I just like learning. I’m so interested in the world and learning about things I don’t know. That’s why my work changes. It’s not like I sat down one day and thought, “Right. You have to continually reinvent yourself in order to make good work!” It’s not like that. It just naturally happens. I immerse myself in a project. I explore it in every dimension I possibly can, and then I’m ready to do it, and then that would lead me on to the next thing I become immersed in. It’s becoming obsessed with something for a number of years and wanting to make art out of it. And wanting to share that journey with other people and hopefully touch them in some way or bring something to their lives. Performance has always been a very important element of what I do, even when I was at art school. As a child, I wanted to perform for people. That’s a big part of my work and what I create. I want to share it. I want to present it, and I hope that other people will love it.
Maybe you don’t have a fear of death because it’s simply the last thing we all learn about.Yeah, maybe. I accept it. That’s why I don’t feel frightened of it, because I live with it. It’s with me every single day. It’s as present as life, every single day of my life. I kind of love it. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I’m a friend with it already.
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