Orlam

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Although it draws a lot on my experience, and my childhood in the countryside, it’s not directly linked to that. That was just a starting point for the imagination. Like any writer, you start with a nugget of experience and then you use your imagination and it develops into something way beyond your experience.” As I’ve begun to appreciate the formal skills of poets and of poetry writing, I’ve found that I’m more drawn to different poets now than I was when I was younger. I think some of the greatest poets for me, particularly — and also poets that had a great influence on me whilst writing Orlam— would’ve been William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, and Robert Louis Stevenson wrote an amazing book called A Child’s Garden of Verses that was written all from the child’s point of view. Orlam is an accomplished poem, a fusing of faerie with the threat of the real-world horrors such as Dogwell’s house, the place where the babysat children of Underwhelem pray ‘the dread door does not open.’ The story is told through the eyes of Ira, a young girl on the cusp of adolescence, a young ‘gurrel’ full of rage, curiosity, and longing. The yearning for completeness, for an absent half, is present throughout the book – an absent mother, a brother who prefers the company of his imaginary twin to his sister, Stacy Gales’ unborn twin, Ira’s longing for Wyman Elvis. Oh, I love that song, too. I find it very moving, and that’s precisely why we put it at the end of the set shortly after 9/11, when everything everyone did had a completely different resonance. It’s hard to remember where that song came from. It was, “I’ve got a feeling.” I sort of wanted to see the beauty and the fragility within a person under a title which implies something more like a porno movie, if that makes sense. There’s a person there and it’s fragile and it’s beautiful and it’s broken. And again, I think I was looking under the surface; I was looking under the stone.

Nine-year-old Ira-Abel Rawles lives on Hook Farm in the village of Underwhelem. Next to the farm is Gore Woods, Ira’s sanctuary, overseen byOrlam, the all-seeing lamb’s eyeball who is Ira-Abel’s guardian and protector. Here, drawing on the rituals, children’s songs, chants and superstitions of the rural West Country of England, Ira-Abel creates the twin realm through which she can make sense of an increasingly confusing and frightening world.

Orlam

I appreciated the dirty words in the Dorset dialect in Orlam, too, like “munter,” which you wrote in a footnote meant “fugly.” I feel a lot calmer when I’m in the countryside. The space and being able to see the horizons, it quite literally lifts a weight off of you—there’s not the density and high buildings and no air. But I also love the busyness of a city, all of the interaction with lots of other people in small spaces. I like having both. I think you are exactly right. Very often I’m not quite sure what a singer’s saying; I’ll pull out words and sing them wrong. But the way I sing them means something to me. And I think that’s the most beautiful thing that I could hope for as a songwriter—that somehow my song makes its way into someone else’s life, and they make it their own. They might hear it completely differently from how it was recorded. But that’s just how it should be: the listener hears what they need to hear. It does feel like that. I think when I was younger, I used to try and keep them in their separate categories. But now I realize that you really can't, and it's actually detrimental. The whole of the work flows better if I just let it be what it's gonna be; I've realized that I'm just an artist that makes things out of words and music and images, and I'm never quite sure what I'm going to end up with. Even in the early stages of writing a song, I very often see things very visually: I might see a scene, almost like a scene from a film, and I'll see the colors and the time of day. The images, the words, the music — they all feed each other.

I read several interviews with you in which you talked about this idea of collapse, as a kind of aesthetic or action that runs through these works: the collapse of time and space, blurring of genders, of myth and reality, life and death. How do you convey this within these songs? I was thinking of "Lwonesome Tonight," which is also a poem in Orlam, and blends images of Elvis, Jesus and the natural world. How does collapse work for you as a principle in this music and in the book? But perhaps that kind of thing might be expected from a songwriter producing a book of poetry. What's more surprising is just how good her individual word choices are and how brilliantly she wields language in general, without the comfort of any musical support. In one way, this is very personal work: It reflects your home, the place you know best. In another way, it's absolutely mythic — fantastical, as you say. It makes me want to ask you, Polly, where are you in this work? Where is the self? Are you standing apart, or are you there with Ira-Abel? Or are you Ira-Abel herself, in the forest pulling bark from the trees?Is there a favorite word or phrase in one of these songs that you can single out? Something you'd love to sing, something you'd love to have roll off your tongue? PJ Harvey was born in Dorset in 1969. Her debut poetry collection,The Hollow of the Hand,was created in collaboration with photographer Seamus Murphy. Still in use would be words like “t’other,” for “the other” and “b’aint”; instead of saying, “he isn’t” or “it isn’t,” you’d go, “b’aint.” Meaning that “it ain’t”— it “be ain’t”— if you see what I’m mean. It's almost like you're accessing different parts of your body, your own sensory system, to bring this to life. It sounds like you approached it with grace and patience rather than what I would have done, which is panic.