Orlam

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One darkness you confront in this work is sexual abuse, and the sexual abuse of children: A key point in the story of Ira-Abel is when she is assaulted in a shed by a local boy. Other male figures in Underwhelm exhibit predatory behavior. I wondered why, for you, it was important to make this a linchpin in the story of Ira-Abel. This makes me think of the conversation around Bob Dylan winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016. It got everyone asking, Is what he does literature? Where’s the membrane between song and prose and poetry? How does the meaning of language change, if at all, when you begin to add rhythm and melody? For Ira, Gore Woods are a place of liberation. Ill-fitting in life, she “yearns ... to un-gurrel”, and there she may do so. It is to the woods she escapes after her assault, and through the months that follow the trees are companions and protectors. In their care, she sheds her girlhood, its restrictions and dangers, and transforms into a freer, truer self, a “not-girl/ not-boy. Bride of his Word”. And what is that word, we wonder: tenderness, music, love, scratching (as the poem calls writing)? Her poetry about the haunted Gore Wood conjures vivid imagery, enough maybe to lend itself to other types of art. Does she hope it might become something else, like a movie?

I just have one final question. I know that you were at something of a crisis point about making music when you started on this album. When you turned to Orlam as a book, you said that music had lost its primary hold on you. Did that feeling of music as the center return? Or do you feel that you, like Ira-Abel, have transformed — and now, as a whole maker, constantly making in different realms, you are just more holistically creative? Do you think it's more possible today for artists to not necessarily identify as one thing than it maybe was before the various entertainment industries took over? Is it more possible to simply be a maker? PJ Harvey comments: “Having spent six years working onOrlamwith my friend, mentor and editor DonPaterson, I am very happy to publish this book of poetry with Picador. Picador feels absolutely the right home for it, and it’s an honour to be in the company of poets like Jacob Polley, Denise Riley and Carol Ann Duffy.” All of which may possibly have been t Well, I think that the song title "Seem an I" is a great example, because "seem an I" means "Well, it seems to me ... ." I just think it's beautiful. It's so elegant and so beautiful and so moving, really. And that started off that whole song.It allows for some amazing descriptive flourishes as Ira takes in everything from sheep (‘sacrifices / with fleecy faces’) to a hated village boy who's described as a ‘straddle-me-face farter’ who ‘wears ewe's-muff cologne’. Many of the poems, as above, have this kind of driving rhythm to them – like twisted nursery-rhymes – and the influence of song is everywhere, with snatches of gospel lyrics, American folksong, Love Me Tender, and moments of call-and-response: There’s a lot of found sound on the album, some of which is recognizable, and some of which is inscrutable. Where were those samples sourced?

She knows about the importance of endings in life and in poetry: “When I’ve read the ending of a great poem, I catch my breath… In my own poems, I don’t want to tell people what to feel. I want to open the doorway so they can find out for themselves. It can be hard to know when a poem is finished. But once finished, it’s finished – it’s of its time and place. And I will have the desire – always – to move forward and to do something else.” I think on the first couple of albums, Dry and Rid of Me, I was just doing it naturally, but I wasn't really aware that I was doing it. For me, it was trying to inhabit the character of the song: Who's the narrator of this song, and how would they portray that song. As I've become more consciously aware of what I'm doing, probably from To Bring You My Love onwards, I would dive into that even more — like, really inhabit the character. A song like " Working for the Man," I think Flood had me singing underneath a blanket with a microphone taped to my throat, in the process of trying to find that claustrophobic, terrifying voice. One of my favorite songs of yours, “Nina in Ecstasy,” didn’t make the cut with the demo albums because it’s a B-side, but you used to play it at concerts. I saw you perform it as your final encore in Denver shortly after 9/11, and it was very emotional. What’s the story behind that song? Following the first publication in April, a special edition of Orlam incorporating Harvey’s own illustrative artwork will be published in October 2022.I think at a subconscious level, I just knew that I didn't want anything to be pinned down. When I'm in the moment in music — not just my own, but even if I'm enraptured by somebody else's, whether live or just listening on a record — I don't feel one thing or another. I don't feel alive nor dead. I don't feel man nor woman. I just feel the music. And I think it was about wanting to tap into that really pure place where you just feel, and you just experience, and nothing yet really has a name.

Polly Jean Harvey is indisputably one of the most adventurous musicians of our time. In fact, to call her simply a musician is inaccurate: She is a visual artist and a multidisciplinary performer who has worked in theater, film and video and published two books of poetry. She's released 10 studio albums under the name PJ Harvey, two with her longtime collaborator John Parish, scores for the film All About Eve and the TV show Bad Sisters and three video albums. When I was first thinking that I might put Orlam on stage, I began to just collect field recordings, recording them myself. But then also, because I've worked in the theater world a lot, I had a lot of great sound designer friends. And sound designers for theater have just about any sound you can think of at their fingertips, just a sort of library of sounds which are open for sound designers to use. So I could be as specific as to say to somebody, " Can you find me a November wind, blowing through barbed wire at dawn?" And they would have, like, three different options for me. In “A Child’s Question (July),” PJ Harvey sings in a jaunty rhythm, “Who’s inneath the Ooser-Rod?/Horny devil? Goaty God?” 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. Dorset dialect? Well maybe. I've worked with Dorset farmers and some of it was good, but some I thought just wrong.Can you talk a little bit about how you've woven together each practice that you've employed to do so — writing, drawing, making music, even performing the poems as a reader — to bring this encompassing narrative to life? To some extent, I'm a little bothered by the bilinguality of the book; I understand the wish to write in pure dialect, but other authors have done that without having to spell it out in RP and footnotes and glossary, and it feels a tiny bit hand-holdy. At the same time, there's something to the way she occasionally needs to change the story just a tiny bit to say the same in English that Ira can think so easily in Dorzet - the rhymes need to change, the animals and plants need to lose some of their magic. It's part of the dying of childhood. It's almost like your voice is more a channel for all of these different selves — Polly, the characters you create — than simply "your voice." Was there a point when you realized, about your singing and your music in general, that you were able to channel all of these selves and worlds?

Orlamfollows Ira and the inhabitants of Underwhelem month-by-month through the last year of her childhood innocence. The result is a poem-sequence of light and shadow – suffused with hints of violence, sexual confusion and perversion, the oppression of family, but also ecstatic moments in sunlit clearings, song and bawdy humour. The broad theme is ultimately one of love – carried by Ira’s personal Christ, the constantly bleeding soldier-ghost Wyman-Elvis, who bears ‘The Word’:Love Me Tender. There's a way, when you're out in the woods, that that nonlinear quality takes over. I don't want to be corny about it or romanticize nature, but it makes sense to me for this story that you would challenge those boundaries. The book has a character named Wyman-Elvis who sings “Love Me Tender.” What does Elvis Presley mean to you? It's almost like you're accessing different parts of your body, your own sensory system, to bring this to life.

Orlam – Special Edition

Conjuring with imagery of her youth growing up on a farm, and of ancient West Country rituals, Orlam is written in Dorset dialect, the first book to use the language in a century.