Luke Kennard is a poet, novelist, and professor of Film and Creative Writing here at the University of Birmingham. We sat outside the library café to discuss his latest collection of poems, The Book of Jonah, a surrealist retelling of the biblical story.

This is your second collection based on a book of the Old Testament. Religion is also central in your novel The Answer to Everything. What is it about Christianity that makes you keep writing about it?

This is good, going straight in with the big themes! I think Christianity is something that tends to get left out of contemporary literature, partly because I think people are sort of embarrassed to talk about it. And yet, it can be something that is central to someone’s life; it tends to be something quite private and because we’re generally polite and reserved in the UK, it’s something we’d prefer not to talk about. I think that’s just part of living in a pluralist society – you never want to impose your views on anyone else. So it’s something that we don’t mention in conversation. But if you’re writing poetry or a character in fiction, you’re so involved with their interior life that it’s kind of inevitable that it comes up, whether they have any faith or not.

And if we think generally about poetry to do with Christianity in the past, it would usually be devotional, in the tradition of Donne’s Holy Sonnets and sermons. They are incredible pieces of writing, but they come from a very specific, committed… I mean, he was literally a preacher, right? I suppose I’m interested in work which is interested in faith and doubt, and tries to analyse whether it’s really a desirable thing to have a faith. I do believe in the importance of inner life, I do believe in that being a fundamental part of being alive. I’m very drawn to that.

In this book you have the character of the English writer, who suffers because he pursues his calling as a writer. On the other hand, Jonah seems to represent the opposite, someone who ignores his calling, literally and figuratively, and suffers for this choice too.

The refusal of a calling: the language of this feels very religious, right? People talk about being called to be a priest or a minister, and people say this in education as well, people feel called to be a teacher; there is something sacrificial in it, it’s a duty one feels called to. The language of that implies a belief in a higher power of some kind. And I think a lot of our figures of speech have that in them. Linguistically, we’re set up as if we all believe in the same thing, which isn’t true.

But with art – music, acting, writing, dance, visual art – it’s kind of a foolish thing to commit yourself to, because it probably isn’t going to go that well. It’s like 0.1% of people who really succeed. This is not a good message to give out as a creative writing instructor. But I think if you have it within you, you sort of do have a duty to practice it. And I think ifyou completely neglect that and think – “because it’s tilting at windmills, because it’s an unrealistic ambition, I’m just going to get a steady job that doesn’t even give me any time to think about it, and I’ll just forget that I ever wanted to do that” – I have seen people really suffer as a result of that. For all the suffering artists I know, it’s the suffering non-artist that I have more sympathy for.

Does the final poem in the collection describe a true on-campus miracle? (The poem, Look, You Wouldn’t Get It, describes a moment where “the act of prayer felt as natural and immediate – involuntary, in fact – as breathing in and out”)

Yes – literally (pointing towards the Molecular Sciences building) just there.

Is this a real experience you had?

Yeah, which is completely… I mean, nothing actually happens, right? It’s a question of complete interiority, and whether it means anything at all. Because it’s the most uneventful thing possible – a poem about feeling distracted during a lecture, feeling bored at school – there’s something peaceful to that poem, and it’s also quite an agnostic poem too, in that is ends in a parody of that final dialogue between Jonah and God, absolutely nothing passes between us. Is that good or bad? It’s probably good that I don’t think I’m being spoken to directly by God, I think that’s a good thing for my mental health. I think it’s also good that I don’t believe I have anything of much use to say to God either.

The Book of Jonah by Luke Kennard is available to buy here.

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