Richard Price: A Month in Portugal

View of Monsanto, Portugal

Earlier this year I spent a month in Portugal as the European poet in residence at the University of Coimbra.

Strictly speaking I have been awarded something like this before. With fellow-poets Isobel Dixon and Simon Barraclough I had a one-day residency at the Travel Bookshop in Notting Hill. Yes, that bookshop, and though neither Julia Roberts nor Hugh Grant were in attendance, I still had a cinematic experience of a kind, reading in some depth in a quiet corner about the wildlife of the islands of the South Atlantic. It takes a lot to beat the uniqueness of the flightless bird known as the Inaccessible Island Rail.

Richard Price has published four poetry collections
with Carcanet Press. His latest, Small World, is available
in paperback and ebook.

I had never applied for anything longer, believing myself unsuited to so much time devoted to just one activity, and particularly that activity: confronting the blank space of page and screen. This belief is surely proven by the poetry I have somehow written over the years in that strange no-time between a managerial day-job – not a literary job in any sense – and the usual demands and lovely distractions of domestic life.

The Coimbra fellowship was different. I taught undergraduate classes in creative writing, gave a postgraduate seminar on the history of British literary movements, and a seminar on translating from a poet’s point of view. Much of the preparation had to be done while I was actually in Coimbra and I was glad of that: poems seemed to mysteriously emerge. At least for me, deadlines give life to poetic lines.

The City of Coimbra put me up in their Casa da Escrita, an elegantly converted townhouse with a room for readings and a library. I was made very welcome by all the staff there, including the Director Professor José Carlos Seabra Pereira and João Rasteiro, both poets themselves.

Coimbra is a beautiful city: a mixture of complex alleys, cascading steps, quiet squares and parks, all ascending the central hill to the university at the top. The Casa is in perhaps the most beautiful part, high up and very close to the ancient cathedral and university precincts. I was particularly pleased to meet Professor Graça Capinha who has been heavily involved in organising the remarkable ‘Meeting of the Poets’ Festivals which Coimbra has hosted over the years, bringing poets from across the world to meet and share their work in public readings. Austerity means that there may never be another festival of that kind.

Small World
by Richard Price

Generally there was a sense of depression and anger in Portugal. At my poetry reading at the end of my stay in Coimbra I was glad to play a kind of poetry ‘fool’, reading newer political poems like ‘Snail mail’ (featured in PN Review a few years ago) but also a few of my more comedic poems, including one where I accompanied myself on a ukulele I had bought for the occasion. (Did you know that ukuleles were originally a Portuguese instrument, taken to Hawaii by emigrants?)

Soon after that I was whisked off to the remote village of Monsanto for the second half of my residency. There I really was on my own, looking out from a hilltop window across a breathtaking plain over to the snow-covered Estrella mountains.

All that time to myself to write: was I as productive as Coimbra, when I had been teaching, responding to commissions, keeping an eye on work emails, preparing for my reading? No, of course not: a few poems were written, and I know other writers would love to be in such position, but I now know for absolutely sure that residencies where all I am asked to do is write can only lead to the triumph of the blank page.

Richard Price was born in 1966 and grew up in Scotland. He is a lyric and experimental poet who writes about love, family, and contemporary life. 

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The whole ocean
from Small World

79; 100; 99/52 (68); (6); (15) 19; 5.2

It’s you.
You’re wired up, tubed up – there’s a snorkel too far in.
There’s precision engineering; moisturiser.
‘If you were a sea creature…’

Mechanical syringes: adrenalin, protein.

On the monitor large soft numbers bubble next to their graph.
They’re colour coded. Green’s the heartbeat; light blue, breath.
This book of hours is electric, it’s a pumped-through aquarium,
it’s sampling the darkest zones of the sea.
It’s an earnest echo-sounder: muted illuminations pulse –
it’s your dynamic ledger of prayer, prayerless, probing higher (deeper)
to faintest life,
beyond all price (priced).

The whole ocean is endangered.

ART is red is blood pressure
and pressure again another soft light blue, the cavity round the heart.
Pressure, pressure, pressure – the tense yellow number
is the brain, its internal push.

You.

You have plastic components and ‘Sedation is titrated to body weight’ –
morphine’s here, as if voluptuous can be synthesised.

Mermaid You, Coral You, the Sea. You’re flotsammed, relic’d, unlike.
‘If you were a sea creature…’

You’re surfaced on a beached life-raft /
you’re tangled, subsea,
snagged in a rig, still too deep.

You’re the bellows, you’re the life support, power all:
the serenity of the machinery, the precision of the staff
(that caring distance is also yours),
your family’s on-hold grief.

All strive.
All strive to fathom this aimless curse, this intricate affront.

‘Watch the glass, not the sea.’
‘Watch the sea, not the glass.’
But the Sea is a secret to itself,
and the Sea would not be capable,
you would not be capable
of remembering your own death,

if you live through it.

Live through it.