ISAMBARD! THE EPIC POEM

by Ralph Hoyte

“Skeined in iron his great bridge still in Bristol looms,

his ‘first child, his darling’. Outlined against cliff,

browbeating rock she soars from ridge to ridge;

far below tumbles muddy Avon, fecund with history;

her sullen tides bear the ghosts of slavers,
their press-ganged bullyboys chained to the idols of

early globalism…”

INTERVIEW WITH RALPH HOYTE 8 May 2006

Hi, Ralph. Let’s talk about ISAMBARD!, your epic poem about Brunel. I know you’ve written it, but how do we get to read – and hear – it?

Hi. Yes, I’ve written it, courtesy of Brunel200 and the Poetry Can. I’ve already done 3 public performances, including two in ‘The Loo’vre’ (the Victorian toilets on Park Row). Check my website at www.ralphhoyte.net for further performances. Copies of ISAMBARD! in Victorian ballad sheet format with embedded 8cm CD can be picked up at, among others Borders, Blackwells, the City Museum, the ss Great Britain, Kuumba, the Arnolfini … I’ll put the venues on my website WIGRTI (when I get round to it). Or if you go there and they’ve run out, tell them to phone me and I’ll let them have some more. Alternatively, the Poetry Can can send you one.

Reserve me a copy, please. Now - why did you write ISAMBARD!?

It’s perhaps unfashionable – or maybe it died out long ago, but I happen to think ‘poetry’ still has a public voice, that is to say, a role in the public life of this country. So I wanted to write a long piece for my voice to perform in public fora (or is that ‘forums’?). I say ‘for my voice’ because an integral part of my poetry is the delivery (which, I suppose, is idiosyncratic). In that sense I’m certainly a performer – to appreciate my work you have to have me! Er… am I off message already?

Well, no, not really … but why an epic?

Well, that’s easy – I think perhaps I’m more like a sculptor than a poet –

So you’re a performer and a sculptor now?

- hang on, let me unearth this thought process: I’ve read of sculptors that they in essence ‘find’ the form within the uncarved block. It’s already there. So I unearth, or sniff out, or find the form the poem needs to take, and only then do I attach the words to this framework. It’s a very sculptural process. In the case of Brunel – well, he’s an epic himself, isn’t he? Everything he did was in the heroic mode. He always wanted to achieve the impossible – and it, of course, killed him. He called out the gods – ‘hubris’, it’s called – and they rewarded him with visions which he spent his short life (he died at 53) realising. Then they squashed him. Splat. What a theme for an epic poem! High drama, complete obsession, a hero driven by ‘blue devils’ (his words), a flawed hero (aren’t we all? He was a bastard to his contractors.). You can’t do the man justice in ½ hour (my epic takes ½ hour to read), I could’ve written a three hour epic. Um, perhaps I will…

So you sniffed out the appropriate form – and then?

Not so simple, actually. I should’ve said that I was also considering a ballad form. They can be epical, too, can’t they? Black Bess, the Raven etc. You see, I wanted quite a lot from ISAMBARD!. It had, first, of course, to be TRUE. That is, I was going to research his life thoroughly and make sure whatever I wrote was factually correct. Then, I had something to prove: an original bid to the SW Brunel200 scheme (the regional as distinct from the Bristol-based scheme) was rejected on the grounds that it ‘had no Heritage value’. This made me so spitting mad (I still am!) that I determined to prove them wrong. How is it possible to say that poetry has ‘no heritage value’? Have they never heard of Milton, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Yeats … what is our heritage if it’s not our poets and writers? Shame upon you! So ISAMBARD is deliberately constructed so that when you’ve read/heard it you have been given a great deal of information about Brunel and his works – in poetic form! Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, Heritage Commission!

Er, score settling aside –

Sorry, getting carried away there. Thirdly, I genuinely wanted, want ISAMBARD! to be a popular, in some ways a ‘populist’ poem. I wanted the words, the rhythms, the imagery, to appeal to your normal (Bristol) punter. Damn it, I wanted to write a poem for the people of Bristol. All of them. And, fourthly, no-one writes epics nowadays, no-one would want to listen to one. That’s a good enough reason to do it.

Sounds like a tall order you set yourself …

I suppose so. It drove me (and my family) mad during the actual writing phase of about 3 weeks. I started writing in approved epic style (Homer, Beowulf, Tolkien) but then thought, ‘this is turgid!’; so I switched to pure ballad style, but thought, ‘no – this is facile!’. Then I got enlightened – ‘Geronimo! Mix the two!’ I thought. So ISAMBARD! is written in 7 sections (and looks at 5 sections of Brunel’s life and works), the start of each new section being denoted by the use of the ballad form.

5 sections of his life – which ones?

The start of his engineering career, as Engineer-in-Charge of his father’s, Marc Isambard’s, Thames’ Tunnel; then the Clifton Suspension Bridge; then, of course, the Great Western Railway; the ss Great Britain – and his nemesis, the Great Eastern. It was difficult to decide what to exclude – everything he did was an epic! –but in the end I decided on a Bristol focus. I would’ve liked to include the Prince Albert bridge over the Tamar (a real triumph), the bridge over the Wye at Chepstow (a sublime engineering solution over a river with one of the highest tidal ranges in the world), and, the ‘atmospheric railway’ in South Devon - then there were his beautiful wooden trestle bridges…

You sound as if you became quite fond of the pig-headed old curmudgeon

Um ah, yes. I can relate to his, as you put it, ‘pig-headedness’. He was an artist. He was driven by ideas, not by financial gain. Of course, he thought no-one could ever be as good as him, so he was arrogant, insufferable and impossible to live with … have I heard that somewhere before?! He worked his arse off. He couldn’t understand how people could not go with an idea, the beautiful solution, but rejected them because they couldn’t understand what he was getting at, or because no-one had done it that way before. Of course, he was sometimes (often?) wrong – but we live in a too cautious, a timid, a timorous age. We don’t dare things anymore. We squash ourselves and our children into little ‘safe’ boxes. ‘Don’t do that, you might get hurt’.

You’re off message again –

Sorry. Anyway, that’s ISAMBARD!. Thanks, Bristol Brunel200 for thinking that epic poetry does have a place in public life and that IT DOES HAVE HERITAGE VALUE!

(Ralph Hoyte interviewed by Calliope)

ralph@hoyte.org.uk