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Alchemy by Gregory Leadbetter

4d ago 40:44

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Episode 84

Alchemy by Gregory Leadbetter

Gregory Leadbetter reads ‘Alchemy’ and discusses the poem with Mark McGuinness.

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This poem is from:

The Infernal Garden by Gregory Leadbetter

Available from:

The Infernal Garden is available from:

The publisher: Nine Arches Press

Amazon: UK | US
Bookshop.org: UK

Alchemy

by Gregory Leadbetter

To separate the subtle from the gross
without injury either to spirit or body
I clip dead flowers to release the ghosts
that rise through the stem in green alchemy:
take that word, Arabic al-kimiya,
prune further, into late Greek and Coptic
to kemet, ancient Egyptian black:
the dark root of the art of elixir.
Sceptical of the power of language
to convey the quintessence of wisdom,
language itself learned how to speak hidden –
to sound both the word and its umbrage:
a darkness conducting the central fire:
a form, like a flower, for its signature.

Interview transcript

Mark: Gregory, where did this poem come from?

Gregory: Well, it probably reaches right back to my teen years in some strange way, because when I was a teenager, I discovered a pleasure in reading all kinds of esoterica. And among that material was, of course, things about alchemy and the idea of the whole story of alchemy really, the idea that this was, I don’t know, among the most learned in the land, that these people were actually in pursuit of something that has since proved, well, let’s say, elusive, if not impossible, the idea that there might be this substance, the philosopher’s stone, the elixir, that might actually transmute base materials into gold, but also that this was, in fact, a metaphor for something about our search for knowledge and wisdom. The fact that that had been part of European and Arabic intellectual history, should we say, for so long, always fascinated me. And so that’s one strand.

And then, actually, I think the other strand is really to do with thinking about poetry itself and art itself and how often alchemy is used as this kind of metaphor for the transfiguring that goes on in the work of art and the work of poetry. So the poem has deep roots in my reading and thinking and the splicing together of that interest in, if you like, the esoteric tradition and poetry itself. I think that’s where it came from.

As to the timing, why now? I mean, why did I write this? Why did it take me so long if it’s been a lifelong interest? I think it’s quite difficult to write compellingly about these things. And that’s part of the interest in them, in some ways. Of course, it’s this idea that the occult and the esoteric is also a strange thing to sort of spend, to end a strange realm to enter, if you like. But for me, something just clicked. The time felt right to actually tackle this. And you know what, I wanted to do it in a very concise way, an intensely focused way. So, yeah, it’s those two strands in my interests, really. I think that’s where the origin story of the poem lies.

Mark: Well, thank you for such a concise introduction to a vast subject. I mean, alchemy is one of those things that really is endless. And you’re right about the fact that it was the learned, not the…maybe they were credulous, I don’t know, but we tend to think of alchemy and the occult now in terms of credulous superstition. But it really was the elite who were practising this. And it’s maybe not massively well known that Sir Isaac Newton spent more time studying alchemy than he did what we would consider physics.

Gregory: Absolutely.

Mark: So the idea of the Newtonian universe being devoid of magic would have been news to Newton.

Gregory: Exactly.

Mark: And I think it’s a really good point that, okay, on the one level, the quest continues to find the philosopher’s stone that’s going to turn these base metals into gold in a literal, concrete sense. But as you say, it’s always been a metaphorical, spiritual form of transformation for the practitioner.

Gregory: Yes.

Mark: And I think it’s interesting that there’s a lot of poetry written about alchemy and magic in general. And my theory is that they have a lot in common. You know, metaphorical thinking was integral to magic. And guess what, it’s integral to poetry as well.

Gregory: Yes, I couldn’t agree more. Poetry, for me, is a form of magic, perhaps the most compelling form, as far as I’m concerned. And what I mean by that is really that it’s something also that I suppose I’ve spent so long with it, it just feels so entirely natural to me to think this way. But working with poetry, you’re really working with what I think of as the psychoactive properties of language. You know, it really is a work of transfiguration. Even moment to moment, people talk about, ‘Oh, well, a poem is not going to change the world,’ but it does have a palpable effect on consciousness. And that is a change. That is a change that enters the fabric of reality. And working with language in the way that a poem requires you to work really is the work of transfiguration in that magical sense, as far as I’m concerned.

Mark: So that is a big, bold idea. And what I like about this poem, and also the whole collection, by the way, is the fact that you’re able to, have these weighty concepts that maybe some poets would shy away from these days, but you do it with real precision.

Gregory: Thank you.

Mark: I mean, obviously, a big danger in writing about magic is it’s such a colossal cliché.

Gregory: Yes.

Mark: But in every poem, you bring a freshness. You bring a clarity of thought. So in this one, for instance, I mean, you might say that the thesis of it is ‘to separate the subtle from the gross’. I mean, I guess that’s what you’re doing as a poet here. And then you really have got this fascinating etymological rabbit hole. So you go to the Arabic and then the Late Greek and Coptic and then the ancient Egyptian. Are these languages an enthusiasm of yours?

Gregory: Well, I don’t speak Arabic or Greek or Coptic or ancient Egyptian, alas, but I do have a profound interest in language and etymology, in particular. I mean, it’s a sort of obsession of mine, really. And so it’s a great delight to be able to work with words in this way. And again, I suppose there’s a reference in the poem to all that a word contains, but it’s not necessarily that obvious. So there’s a history to every word that we don’t always think about, but that history travels with the word. And it’s there whether we’re thinking about it consciously or not, that history has arrived with that word. And I suppose that’s another principle that kind of emerged in the composition of this poem. Yeah.

So the etymology and the way that etymology can yield these connections across cultures and actually complicate our sense of the language that we’re just working with day in and day out and can enrich that, that is a wonderful thing to me. And something that it’s great for everybody to bear in mind, the promiscuity of language, as it were, and these connections that it makes across time and space and peoples. It travels in the most unpredictable ways, and I find that very, very exciting.

Mark: Amen. My children are at the stage of rolling their eyes when daddy starts on about etymology again. It’s not far before we get into a conversation with whatever the subject is, I’ll say, ‘Well, what does the etymology tell us?’ And they’re like, ‘Do we have to, Dad?’ But I think, like most poets, I’m just fascinated by… obviously, we’re fascinated by words. A couple of episodes ago, I was talking to Peter Gizzi about Auden’s slightly throwaway but wise comment that poets should be humble because our raw materials are public property.

Gregory: Yes. Yes.

Mark: That’s that promiscuity that you talk about. And I think it’s natural to be thinking, well, what are these things? Where did they come from? And why is that one so similar to and resonant and redolent of that other word?

Gregory: Yes, exactly.

Mark: And it’s like, here, you deconstruct the word ‘alchemy’. So you’re going into ‘black: / the dark root of the art of elixir.’ And, of course, it can go back to that, but it also goes forward into ‘chemistry’. It’s the same root, isn’t it, for modern chemistry?

Gregory: It is. It is. Yeah.

Mark: And you talk about, ‘to sound both the word and its umbrage’, I think that’s a very key phrase. So ‘umbrage’, obviously, literally meaning shadow, but here, picking up the connotations, the history, kind of the whole penumbra of meanings that constellate around it. Maybe you could say something about that.

Gregory: Yes, that’s right. And again, I think this idea of… in the poem, I suppose, is this idea of that scepticism, actually, as well, about the power of language to work this magic. And I think that scepticism is absolutely essential here. You mentioned earlier, credulity. And so I think scepticism is our friend in all dealings with anything with that word magic. Because it also forces us to really, really think about what’s going on here.

And I suppose, with that idea of the umbrage being conveyed with the word and to sound it, both literally sounding it, uttering it, but also exploring it in the moment of utterance as well, to sound both the word and its umbrage, the idea of exploring the dark root of language in the very act of working with an uttering language and drawing upon that, the well, the darkness, the central fire, as it were, that goes all the way back, with ‘the darkness conducting the central fire’, as in the words of the poem, to working with all those, the mystery that is inherent to the use of language itself, and touching the common roots of life and language, the common roots of organic life and this seemingly insubstantial thing that works invisibly, that is words, that is language as well, and actually working with that common root.

Mark: Okay. So, okay, I’m imagining a listener listening to this and going, ‘Okay, that’s all fascinating, chaps. We get that you two are geeking out on language.’ What’s it got to do with alchemy, though?

Gregory: Yeah. So that is to do with… so again, that’s where the etymology comes in a little bit. So you go back to the Arabic, al-kimiya, and then all the way back to kemet. Now, that blackness… so kemet was actually the ancient Egyptian name for what we now think of as ancient Egyptian civilisation. It’s the black land. The black land. And that blackness was associated with the Nile flood and the rich black earth that was immensely fertile. So here, we’re getting to the idea of something that emerges, that is transformative, a darkness or blackness that is transformative and also almost infinitely and miraculously, you might say, fertile. So this idea of regenerative cycles, the generation of something that seems to transcend death, death is a part of it, that is recognised, but there’s also the regenerative principle at work in that moment.

And so that’s why it goes all the way back. I’m taking that alchemical idea of transformation and fresh generation and the search for the elixir back to this mysterious root in kind of the principle of life itself, really, sort of the emergence of self-regeneration. And I suppose that’s where it really connects and goes right back to the action at the start of the poem. We should say, perhaps, something about the greenness of this alchemy, the fact that I’m connecting it there with this pruning.

Mark: Well, that was a question I had: what are flowers doing in a poem about alchemy?

Gregory: Yeah. I mean that’s a swerve on my part towards, I suppose, again, connecting that process to organic life. And just something as simple as pruning, the gardener’s process of pruning, and again, I suppose, thinking of working with poetry is a kind of pruning as well. And the separation of the subtle from the gross, you can see that in terms of both what you do when you deadhead a plant when you’re pruning and you’re encouraging new growth. And I think working with language in a poem, you’re pruning in a way to encourage new growth. So I’m drawing these kind of analogies in this admittedly hyper condensed way across those three things, really.

Mark: And that hyper-condensed quality, that is really integral to alchemy, isn’t it? Because you’ve got the idea of the crucible wherein the transformation was supposed to be forged. And turning to the form of the poem, you’re using a very particular and quite familiar form of poetic crucible for this poem, are you not?

Gregory: I am, indeed, yeah, the sonnet, which is a form very close to my heart. And again, I suppose, one of the things I’m interested in when I’m working with received forms, in poetry, we sometimes have these debates about received forms and, resistance to received forms as well. But to me, language itself is a received form. We’re always working with received forms.

Mark: Good point. Good point. I will remember that.

Gregory: Literally, we can’t get away from it. So one of the things I love about the sonnet is the way it travels across time and space. As a form, it has its own cultural history, but it’s also immensely pliable, actually, even though, sort of, it has its kind of patterns, which are very familiar, as you know. But I find working within that crucible, within the intensity of that small space, to be immensely productive and far from limiting. I find that it actually enables things to happen that perhaps wouldn’t otherwise happen because of the pressures within the crucible of the sonnet and the materials that you’re putting into it and the processes that you’re enabling through the blend of words, through the ingredients, as it were, that are going into that crucible.

You know, that’s really where the magic is happening. It has to happen in the fabric of the poem itself or not at all. I think this is… again, we talked a little bit earlier about the difficulty of talking about alchemy and magic in productive ways. You can’t just dress up as a wizard and say, ‘Oh, I’m doing magic now.’

Mark: Tempting as it is! [Laughter]

Gregory: Tempting as it is, you know. And let’s not rule it out. But what I’m saying, it’s not just about, saying, ‘Oh, I’m being magical now.’ That’s actually not good enough. I’d rather say, ‘I’m not doing any magic at all,’ but try and focus on something that’s going on in the fabric of the poem itself. It has to happen there or not at all. And that’s where the real magic happens. It’s not just talking about these things. So again, perhaps a slight digression, but it connects back to what we were talking about. And it is related to this idea of the form of the sonnet and the kind of peculiar pressures that the sonnet applies in its demands that are inherently transformative.

You know, the connections that can be made are, again, I just find them extremely exciting when you find a connection across this, 14-line short thing, but something extraordinary can happen within that space. And of course, the sonnet itself contains a self-transforming principle in the idea of the volta. This is the term for, the turn, of course, the moment where things are changed in some way. And so I love the fact that the sonnet itself has that principle built in, as it were.

Mark: I was saying, in just last month’s episode about Sir Walter Raleigh’s sonnet, ‘To His Son,’ the sonnet has continued because it’s like a really handy thinking device for poets. There’s a certain shape and size of problem or topic or question that you just find yourself reaching for the sonnet before it starts to emerge as you write. And you’re absolutely right, and I think you make very interesting use of the volta, the turn in the sonnet.

So, as we’ve covered quite a few times on the podcast, the sonnet is basically divided into two. You’ve got the first eight lines, the octave, and then there’s the turn, which is a shift of perspective of some kind that leads us into the sestet, which is the final six lines. And I was rereading this poem this morning and noticing, the octave starts ‘To separate the subtle from the gross’. That’s where you begin. And you’ve got gross as the end word. And then, eight lines later, we are at ‘the dark root of the art of elixir’. So you’ve gone from gross to elixir in eight lines.

And as so often in really nicely written sonnets, you can almost read a poem from the end words. And you’ve got some lovely half rhymes here. You’ve got ‘gross’. It goes, ‘gross’, ‘body’, ‘ghosts’, ‘alchemy’, ‘al-kimiya, ‘Coptic’, ‘black’, ‘elixir’. I mean, that’s, like, a little poem in itself, isn’t it? And then the next line, the next word after elixir, which is kind of the ultimate goal of the art of alchemy and transformation, we’ve got ‘Sceptical’ – that word jumps in at the beginning of the sestet – ‘of the power of language’. And then it goes all the way down through ‘language’ – these are the end words – ‘language’, ‘wisdom’, ‘hidden’, ‘umbrage’, ‘fire’, ‘signature’.

In fact, I’m going to read the last two lines: ‘A darkness conducting the central fire: / a form, like a flower, for its signature.’ So obviously, I assume, you’re thinking of poetry in there as well. I mean, what you’ve done here is beautifully realised. I mean, at what point did you start to think, ‘Oh, I’ll write this as a sonnet?’ Was it from the beginning? Did it emerge in the process of writing? How conscious were you of putting sceptical there and, the various beginning and end points?

Gregory: Yeah. I think when I started to want to write about this, I think there were almost two options that seemed possible to me, either something that was really long or something that was really tight. And I opted for something that was really, tight. And so, almost as soon as I started writing, that was what I was conscious of. And then, as I started composing, I did think, ‘How is this going to be?’ and lots of possibilities in front of me. But the sonnet just felt right, almost as soon as I started. And when I started to find… when I started to think in terms of those rhymes and the half rhymes, it really started to catch its own. Its own subtle logic started to emerge in the composition in a way that I wanted to follow.

And with the volta, yes, I think it was really important to me, actually, to get that note of scepticism in, for all the reasons we’ve talked about. Because I was really thinking about the esoteric tradition. Again, as I was saying earlier on, why were they so obsessed, these people, as you say, the learned of those times? Why were they so obsessed with this idea of keeping things hidden, the esoteric, the inner thing? And I think it was something to do with this idea of, actually, if you just blurt this stuff out in an uninformed way or in a half-true way, it could cause more damage than good. It could cause confusion. You know, I think there was this scepticism about the capacity of language, perhaps, to carry these things, the capacity of science to do… science, in the broadest sense of the word, knowledge, to do its work. The scepticism as to knowledge itself, I suppose, as well.

There’s a recognition in the scepticism about language to do this kind of work, an implicit recognition that this kind of work is of a kind of awesome power. And what, therefore, is the right channel? How will this be manifested? How can the elixir be got? And if not by these means available to us. So, again, thinking about language as that medium, as this poem does, I wanted to face that head on really and to find a way through the way of incorporating both this sort of faith in language and the sort of magic of the psychoactive properties of language, a faith in that, but also, I think, a necessary and a healthy scepticism about its capacities that actually becomes kind of an enabling manoeuvre. Because, in recognising the scepticism, it forces us into a solution, in a way, or at least, I hope it does in this poem.

Mark: So what that’s making me think of is, the magician when they’re doing their trick. They always very carefully… now, look, examine everything. You know, you can look up my sleeve. You can see how there’s no kind of hidden things here. And obviously, it’s a way of addressing the scepticism. But inevitably, we know there’s a bit of misdirection going on as well.

Gregory: Indeed.

Mark: And look, there’s a very interesting and subtle shift, where, in the three lines into the sestet, you say, ‘Sceptical of the power of language / ‘to convey the quintessence of wisdom’. So that’s what you were just talking about. But then it kind of shifts: ‘language itself learned how to speak hidden’.

Gregory: Yes. Yes.

Mark: What’s going on there?

Gregory: Well, that’s probably a key line. And I think there’s possibly… I enjoy the possibilities of syntax. And when we ‘speak hidden’, it suggests also that something is being hidden in that act, but also that it is speaking the hidden. The syntax there remains open to both those possibilities. And I think that syntactical doubleness is really crucial to that line and what I’m up to, really, with that line and the poem as a whole, really. So I think this idea that language adapts, again, we’re just talking about, the uses of scepticism in a way, as well as the uses of that faith in the power of language. Language adapts to try and find a way through that kind of dilemma. And I think poetry is almost the quintessence of that adaptation, for me, because it’s both a form of saying and not saying.

It’s not just about travelling from A to B. It’s not just about getting to an endpoint or a punchline. The means, or I should say, the end is in the means. The end itself is in the means. And that, to me, is absolutely fundamental to poetry as an art form. Again, it’s in the process. It’s in spending that time, that space time within the sphere of the poem, within that atmosphere that it is created through its work with language. So I think that’s really what I’m trying to do there, actually, is hold that dilemma open and for language itself to fill the tension between it and find a way.

Mark: So you’re describing language itself doing something, and language itself is doing something through that syntactic doubleness. And I think this is really wonderful, because syntax – when you mention it, people’s eyes glaze over. It’s the worst English lesson ever! ‘Oh, no, we’re doing grammar this Friday afternoon.’ But you’ve hit on something really important, which is that syntax is the way that language becomes supple and flexible, and the meanings can shift. And for a poet, you really get to play with things, as you are doing very delightfully here.

And then that leads us into this wonderful ending, ‘to sound both the word and its umbrage’. We talked about, the denotation and the connotation, the associations of the word. ‘a darkness conducting the central fire:’ – I have to say, I’m quite envious of that line, Greg. And ‘conducting’, it’s a lovely word because it could be… I guess, thinking of the etymology, it’s got to be related to duct, to pipe, to stuff flowing or being directed in the flow. Maybe there’s an element of the conductor as in the sense of the musical conductor. And of course, conducting, it’s a scientific thing. I was going to say, it’s chemistry, but maybe it’s physics. I don’t know.

Gregory: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mark: But basically, that word is conducting a lot of different meanings and even disciplines, isn’t it?

Gregory: Yes. Yes. And again, that’s something I’m very keen on, is activating, if you like, as much of the spectrum of possibilities within a word as possible, when I’m using words in poems. And, yes, all of those senses that you described are there for me, certainly. And the idea that conducting is not necessarily entirely controlling, either. I think that’s another really important principle. It’s not about actually having a fixed determinant end, but it’s an enabling act, something that activates, animates. There’s this wonderful phrase in Coleridge, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, English poet, where he talks about ‘kindling the germinal power’. Kindling the germinal power. And these are…

Mark: He’s so good, isn’t he?

Gregory: Yeah. Yeah. And that is what I really want from poetry, really, from a poem, is that, to be kindled. And that is not determinative. You know, that’s not about arriving at a fixed endpoint. It’s about activating and animating and bringing alive, which is not about control. And I’d say that’s another aspect of that word conducting, that it’s not fixing something in place, it’s not determining it, it’s not limiting it, but activating and animating.

Mark: Again, I think that’s a lovely description of the final line. It’s not an endpoint, so much as something that’s been activated, so you say. So you’ve just talked about the central fire, a form like a flower for its signature. So I’m assuming that the form is initially literally the flame of the fire, which is like a flower. Of course, this is a poet writing about form and signature. And there’s signing it maybe with a flourish at the end. There’s a lot going on there, isn’t there?

Gregory: Yes, yes, I think you’re right. Yes. And I did want to make that analogy between a poem and a form of life, like a flower, I suppose. And also the idea that, again, what is the endpoint? What is the quintessence? What is the elixir? What is that ultimate wisdom? And then bringing that back to something. These things are often addressed in very intellectual terms. I suppose I wanted to bring it back to something more physical. And the flower is important there. Again, the idea that, actually, the answer may be something that is just alive, you know. You wouldn’t say, ‘What’s the point of a flower?’ Well, I suppose some people might do that. And, of course, in biological terms, you can say, ‘Oh, well, it’s an adaptation to these conditions that evolved by natural selection.’ And that’s absolutely fine, you know. But also, it is the fact that it simply is. I think that’s the thing that I’m perhaps drawing attention to there, this idea of something that actually is not purely reducible to intellectual terms but is actually much more to do with the fact of, and really, if you like, the miracle of life itself.

Mark: Well, Greg, that feels like a good point to stop, so that we don’t start reducing anything in your poem into too gross matter. And, yeah, let’s have another listen to the poem and marvel at the marvels of alchemy and poetry. Thank you, Greg.

Gregory: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. It’s been an absolute pleasure.

Alchemy

by Gregory Leadbetter

The Infernal Garden

‘Alchemy’ is from The Infernal Garden, published by Nine Arches Press.

Available from:

The Infernal Garden is available from:

The publisher: Nine Arches Press

Amazon: UK | US
Bookshop.org: UK

Gregory Leadbetter

Gregory Leadbetter’s new collection of poetry is The Infernal Garden, published by Nine Arches Press. His previous books with Nine Arches Press are Maskwork (2020) and The Fetch (2016). His other works include Caliban (Dare-Gale Press, 2023); Balanuve, with photographs by Phil Thomson (Broken Sleep, 2021), and The Body in the Well (HappenStance Press, 2007). His writing for the BBC includes the extended poem for Metal City, broadcast on Radio 3 in 2023. As a critic he publishes widely on the history and practice of poetry, and his book Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination was awarded the University English Book Prize 2012. He is Professor of Poetry at Birmingham City University.

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