From the Periphery to the Centre: A Conversation with Duncan Wiese

Duncan Wiese by Asbjørn Sand.

Rosie Ellison-Balaam spoke to Duncan Wiese about his work of pastoral poetry Tityrus, to mark its publication in English, translated from Danish by Max Minden Ribeiro & Sam Riviere, today. From Virgil and Edmund Spenser to Anne Carson and Ursula K. Le Guin, Wiese talks about how he approached an ancient form – and the character of the young shepherd Tityrus – to write contemporary poetry about doing drugs, being on medication, suffering heartache, and moving between the countryside and the city and back again.

The character of Tityrus is from Virgil’s Eclogues – what attracted you to this ancient character?

I stumbled upon him by accident. On my first trip to Scotland, where my father is from, I bought a small, very cheap, old ‘World Penguin’ edition of Virgil’s Eclogues. I remember reading it, and I knew I wanted to write, but I didn’t know then how serious it would get. I read the first poem in the collection, ‘The Dispossessed’, about an old shepherd, Meliboeus and a young shepherd, Tityrus. While Meliboeus has lost his land from the state’s reorganisation of land after the civil war, Tityrus makes the journey from his small countryside life to Rome to persuade officials to let him keep his land. At first, I thought it was a surprisingly modern poem, or a dialogue; what stuck with me was this journey from rural areas to the big city in order to gain something.

At that point, I was living with some friends in the woods on Funen. We were building a cottage with my dad, an experiment as I’d then lived in Copenhagen for a while, and I didn’t know what to do other than that I wanted to write. Time passed, and I got into a creative writing school in Denmark and started working on a few projects, hoping to write a novel. But at the end of the year, suddenly the name Tityrus came up, and I started writing this poem. He was a character that kept returning. After the novel project failed, I returned to poetry where my interest in writing had started. Tityrus was my way into it.

I moved from writing in the first person to the third person. The novel had been in the first person, with a main character named Thomas. I’d turned away from a confessional style, so it felt very natural and easy to replace the Thomas character with Tityrus. I started to write in a way that was more ‘epic’; it gave me a vessel to dramatise things that I needed to work through. Instead of, ‘I feel bad’, I could write, ‘Tityrus feels bad’. It created a distance, which made it easier to work with, but it also drew a lot with it, such as the theme of moving from the countryside to the city and back again. 

It also allowed me to write about the pastoral. The pastoral is quite an urban genre: you sit in the city and write about the country, mostly in an idyllic way – but I wanted to find a way where I could write about growing up in the countryside while being in the countryside, as well as being away from it. I wanted to write it in a less idyllic manner and be more true to the agricultural reality though keeping this deep love for the countryside. I’m now living in a village that reminds me of where I grew up.

So there is a lot of you in it too… Is Tityrus a figure who transcends time – and is he representative of anyone who’s ever done that journey?

Yes, spot on. This journey is something that happens all the time, in every generation. My kids are going to do it as well, moving from growing up in the periphery to the centre, and maybe even back again. If you grow up in a small village, you will either stay there working in agriculture, or you will go to the city to get an education.

I remember the first time I took the train to Copenhagen, thinking ‘this is wild!’ Now I work in Copenhagen and it’s a journey I do every day; the journey is no more than an hour and a half. Which is exactly why the poem stuck with me – because it’s represents a country boy in the city. It is about a lot of things, but it works with these many movements back and forth, from rural areas to cities.

In many ways, it feels like a coincidence, like a spirit popped up when I was doing something else, this ‘Tityrus’. It felt more like a possibility or a tool given to me at a point when I was stuck with my other writing. I just went with it and used Tityrus; the other names in the book came from The Eclogues too. I had read it quite some time before, so it felt more like a coincidence.

There was also something about the tone; I liked the idea of using old, high-classical poetry in modern poems about doing drugs, or being on Ritalin, or being heartbroken in the city. My poems were also inspired by the television I watched as a child, like Beverly Hills 90210 and Friends, as it infused you with ideas about romantic relationships and friendships. I engaged a lot more with television than books when I was younger, so Tityrus gave me this romantic form in which to write these young adult experiences – and that in a way that would be readable, not annoying.

Tityrus by Duncan Wiese, rendered into English by Max Minden Ribeiro & Sam Riviere.

In Tityrus, the idyllic is left behind, replaced by the banality and darkness of modern life. Can you say more about what attracted you to playing with the pastoral form?

I had a realisation when I started writing that all writing is part of a tradition. You are always part of it; language is part of tradition, culture is part of tradition, even technology. When I was younger, I wanted to create something completely new, but at some point later on I realised it was impossible. The options you have available to you as a writer are about rearranging and renegotiating tradition.

By taking up the pastoral form in an obvious way, I wanted to challenge the idyllic view of the countryside and of childhood. I strive to write beautiful poems, but the idea was to capture the beauty of the countryside which is very harsh; animals are slaughtered, and in childhood, these are extremely scary things. I wanted to infuse the pastoral genre with some of the more violent or unheimlich aspects of the countryside and of nature, yet also draw on its magic; the feeling of finding out you can harvest mushrooms in a city graveyard. For me, it's a renegotiation of the genre. What is poetry about the countryside; and what is poetry about the city? Tityrus is walking in the woods and thinking about pornographic videos, or suddenly there is a big electric power station or a campsite. The countryside is mixed, everything interwoven.

Pastoral poetry is just as much about young people wanting to have sex with each other and not being able to. It draws a lot on popular culture, my upbringing, all the rap music and television I consumed. The genre was a way to place it into a higher tradition and see where it fit. It is surprising, there is a pastoral poem called ‘Daphne and Chloe’, which is basically like watching a soap opera of two young adults who want each other. When one is showering the other watches, and they are both very aroused… but then pirates swoop in and steal one of them! There are always obstacles.

And were there any particular poems you drew on other than The Eclogues?

For a long time, ‘The Dispossessed’ was the only pastoral poem I had read. It was only after figuring out what I was writing that I became interested in using the pastoral genre. I read The Shepheardes Calender by Edmund Spenser (who also uses the character of Tityrus). As for more modern poetry, I read Anne Carson. Her Autobiography of Red is an amazing book, and it inspired me to see the way in which you can change perspective, writing from the view of one of the monsters Herakles killed. You can do a radical renegotiation of those patriarchal myths. Autobiography of Red is a novel in verse which gave me something to strive for. It is a book that I keep returning to, as it works within a literary tradition but also makes it completely new; it is extremely well-composed poetry, yet it is also dynamic, touching, and intense.

Your poem is written in the third person but shifts in the prologue and epilogue to the first person. The poem captures Tityrus’s sensitivity, but the passages that bookend it are more internal, confessional, and vulnerable. Why does it take this form and why was it important to include Tityrus’s voice?

That’s such a nice question. Both the epilogue and prologue were written after the main text. The third person was a tool to write about things I found hard to write about, but in the end, it was also more like a machine; a language machine, taking over my writing. I felt like I was getting better and better at writing Tityrus’s scenes. But I realised I had to stop the machine and break it up. The epilogue especially is my talking to Tityrus. When you write in the third person, you get attached to your character, but you also put them through a lot. So, here, I felt like I had to comfort and give the character some hope. But equally, I had to break free and return to the more confessional style that I had been working in earlier. I realised how much better I’d become at writing after spending time in the third person as my early confessional style was just teenage.

You can’t just say, ‘Oh, I feel bad’. You create something completely different in the third person, something that is much more readable, as you make room for the reader. It is not something I thought that much about when I was writing it, but I realised this was a quality in lots of poetry I like; it’s scenic but also narrative.

For me, writing is something that goes on, with a book, you do this, [holds out his hands and brings them down in a cutting motion] the book is a cookie cutter, and this is the book. I’ve now written another book in Danish called Cherry Pickers, and in many ways, it picks up from where the epilogue ends.

The prologue was also about this classical idea; it was me saying, let’s go all the way, let’s make it look like a classical book, and let’s have a prologue and an epilogue. The prologue was an entrance song to the poem, a way for me as a writer to say here I am, to talk to this character. It’s the writer going up on stage and saying, ‘Here we are; this is the book’.

In my new project, I suddenly had a suite that was very Tityrus-like, and I just had to throw it out because it was just like the classical steam engine had started again. You could call it a phase, but it has been very conducive to my writing; it gives me a lot of tools. Often with first books, you need a crutch, something to help you; this was the only way I could throw myself into literature. It gave me protection from imposter syndrome.

At the beginning of the poem, Tityrus is fascinated by where a little boy has drowned. It holds a place in his dreams, though he tries not to believe it. It reminded me of childhood folklore, where you hear about something that happened in the woods or on the river. Is this something you encountered growing up?

Yes, it was like that – the poem works with the way children build up the world through myths. As a kid, I was afraid of the dark. But when I moved to the city, living in an apartment where you always hear people, I found it comforting. Whereas the quiet of the countryside has an unheimlich quality, as you often don’t know what the sounds are. Actually, when I moved back to the countryside, I had a few weeks where I couldn’t sleep as the noises were so different.

The idea of the small boy drowning was emblematic of Tityrus’s drugged-up sense that he’s drowning or being crushed. However, he also remembers playing in a barn when lots of hay bails fall on him. In the book, this death is the death of the self. It also has an agricultural theme, as there are lots of accidents in farming; young men and older men die from working accidents. There is also a friend’s father who commits suicide, which is about the vulnerability of the male body too. It’s also exemplified by the goats; it is the young males that are killed for meat, and the female goats kept for breeding. The book is about surviving this vulnerability.

But you are right, it was a tale where I grew up near the sea. There was a kid who drowned there, and I think all of us were interested in it and talked about it. It was a myth where the children were driving the narrative. 

Tityrus is described as a ‘comparison machine’. You liken the rubbish bins of an apartment to a digestive system, or the forest to the city. Can you tell me more about these comparisons, which often blur the animal, mythic, and human?

I guess poetry can be like a comparison machine, mixing and levelling out differences. Comparison is a big motor, as with Tityrus, as it is with me. Being in the woods with your iPhone, you have all information available; the distance between things has shortened, and the distance between different domains is non-existent because of the time of information we live in. Blurring these lines also makes a point with high language and low language, a way of mixing all things. At one point, I was very interested in the idea of mapping characters from one domain onto another. It was not so much about metaphors but using comparisons, as they level out differences, bringing rural poetry or pastoral poetry into the city and the city into the countryside but also bringing the old into something new. I wanted it to be something more. I suppose being a teacher, spending time reading and talking about old and new poetry, I was bringing together many ideas. 

In many ways, contemporary poetry does that; if you read Ocean Vuong, for example, he uses a lot of traditional Vietnamese folklore and Western myths, which is a theme of our time. And now we can get all books nearly for free; there is such a massive overproduction, and it’s all on the internet. It is a situation that the postmodern, or post-postmodern has given us. 

The world’s library is at your hand, but it’s for you to sort out. It’s a mix of Friends, 90210, Lana Del Ray, Virgil, Odysseus, Dante, and Anne Carson. It’s a big soup, but that’s what I enjoy. Also, a lot of the television and music I enjoy makes references to older culture. I see it everywhere – it’s an occupational hazard.. If I see a silly comedy like It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, which is a disgusting comedy, it makes me think of Sir Philip Sidney. He wrote that the whole idea of something being comical is that the characters don’t know what they are doing is bad or comical, the moment they realise it, it turns into a tragedy. When you watch something like Succession, it’s a mix of comedy and tragedy. It’s a lens of consuming culture, a hobby, and an obsession that has now turned into my work. 

One of my kids has just started Kindergarten. She has soaked up so much of our language and personal traditions, and I now realise that tradition is deeply personal. I could have just read poetry from the 80s and 90s and that would have been my output. I realised that we have these personal traditions and libraries, and you end up having your own canonical works. For me, it’s a mix of the television I watch, the literary theory and poetry and fantasy I’ve read, and all my failed attempts to read The Divine Comedy.

But when you see a kid, it’s obvious how it works; she read small picture books about fish when she was very young, so now she’s getting bigger and bigger books on fish. She knows such a lot of aquatic animals, it’s now part of her canon to make up new fish names. It’s really interesting to think of what our traditions and language are. It’s something that has been given by our parents, and the culture we live in.

I like the experience of reading something old but surprisingly modern, I think: ‘I can mirror myself in this although it’s 2,000 years old’. 

Those ancient texts have a universality to them. They will always feel modern, so you can pull threads out and apply them elsewhere. 

Yeah, I thought about The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin and realised she might have taken the same plot from Virgil; one moving from a poor planet to the rich planet, and back. She might have read the same Penguin edition as me but decided to make a sci-fi novel out of it. When I was younger, I would have been really mad at myself for saying this, because I had this idea that I could bring something ‘new’ to the table. But this reimagining is what you do with tradition and language; I could have made a new language, but it would be annoying to read. It has to have something that’s accessible. 

For readers, it’s something interesting too, from reading The Dispossessed to The Shepheardes Calender, you find connections while reading, and you see the author’s constellations of references and interests. It is an interest wanting to know what other people are thinking about.  

Yes, and if you are lucky you will have maybe 80 years on earth in which to consume as much material as possible. I think of myself as a filter or a rock in the water that bends the flow a bit. I’m at the point where some culture goes in, and more culture comes out. These three or four pages – written in 300 BC – spawned literature from Edmund Spenser, Ursula K. Le Guin, and now me.

In a way, I feel in a hurry, as I have two small kids and don’t have much time to read or write, and I spend a lot of time teaching to earn money. But once my kids are at school, I’m looking forward to spending time with my own library, whether books or short comedies or films, having the energy to read or watch something I haven’t seen before. But it is an extremely fortunate job, a privileged job, to be a consumer of culture. I enjoy speculating on old works so much that it doesn’t feel like work at all. 

Back to my question on Tityrus as a ‘comparison machine’, I think the poem also presents him as invested in the idea of processes, often biological ones.

While writing Tityrus, I was treated for anxiety disorder. I had a long period where I was treated for ADHD and was on medicine for one and a half years. It is a weak amphetamine which made me a better student at university. However when I stopped it, I started to feel better as I got other things figured out. Psychology and biology interest me, and the intertwining of those things interests me. What does it mean to have attention deficit disorder; what has happened to me? I might not be that good at reading what I’ve been told to read at university, but if I read what I want, I can read for hours. 

I like reading Robert Sapolsky, a human behavioural biologist at Stanford University. He has 28 lectures from 2011 on YouTube called ‘Human Behavioural Biology’, where he goes through everything from hormones to the environment; I enjoyed having that lens on something. Then on the other side, I like reading Jung. It’s a mapping of biological processes and outputs, which is why it makes sense to me to read Jung. And about myths, it’s how the output from those processes takes form; in writing, dreams, or culture. For a long time, I’ve been fascinated by the mechanics of biology, how the body and brain work, and how it shows itself; I don’t write about it directly, but it’s an underlying interest. 

Tityrus questions his purpose throughout the poem; ‘Tityrus is looking for jobs online, there are no positions for shepherds, Tityrus applies for a job as a receptionist’ – he cannot find his place in the world. Later in the epilogue, he narrates his father’s decline from cancer. Can you talk about presenting the men of the poem in such a vulnerable way? 

Finding a job as a shepherd is like trying to find a job as a poet. The book looks at masculinity in many ways; there is a renegotiation of the traditional male role, presenting masculinity with more vulnerability. I didn’t think about it that much, as it’s an experience of my generation. Masculinity is also a tradition, and I wanted to reenact it, change it, and make it weirder.

The female characters have their lives in the city, their place and purpose, while Tityrus is a floating entity who isn’t sure where his place is. 

The female characters are called by their profession, which twists the tradition of old bourgeois plays, where it would be the male doctor or the male poet. You could critique it and say they are more stereotypical, but they have a firmness about them. It is a book about young men in my generation and those around me. Young men have this potentiality to be more vulnerable. There is a lot of conflict and danger for them. Traditional masculinity is something the book struggles with; it’s more like a laying out of how my generation lives, how Tityrus moves in the world. It has this lostness, but the lostness is not a longing after the traditional masculinity. It’s about finding a place for that vulnerability and openness. Or you could say it’s another kind of masculinity; a rewriting of tradition, shifting through and seeing what we can use and what we can’t.

Tityrus by Duncan Wiese, rendered into English from Danish by Max Minden Ribeiro & Sam Riviere, publishes today. Purchase your copy here.

DUNCAN WIESE (b. 1991) is a Danish poet and a graduate of the Danish Academy of Creative Writing, where he now teaches. He is the author of two poetry books, and his debut, Tityrus, was shortlisted for the prestigious Bodil and Jørgen Munch-Christensen Prize and the Bogforum Prize for New Writing. He lives in Funen.

MAX MINDEN RIBEIRO is a literary translator and academic philosopher. His recent publications include Pelle Hvenegaard’s Dear Zoe Ukhona and Finn Juhl: Life, Work, World by Christian Bundegaard. He lives in Copenhagen.

SAM RIVIERE is the author of three poetry books: 81 Austerities, Kim Kardashian's Marriage, and After Fame, and most recently a novel, Dead Souls (2021).

Top image: Duncan Wiese by Asbjørn Sand