Anne Michaels interview: ‘Every poem is a poem of witness’

The author of Held, longlisted for the Booker Prize 2024, talks about how her novel explores the conflation of science with technology, and the books that have changed the way she thinks about the world

Read interviews with all of the longlisted authors here.

Published August 15, 2024

The inspirations behind my Booker-longlisted book

Every day writing this book I asked myself: in these urgent times, what voice might be small enough to be heard; what do we need now. We measure history by events and actions, but this book wants to assert a different measure for history, the real and powerful effect of our inner lives – what we believe, what we value, what we love, what we aspire to. Held explores our conflation of science with technology, the surrender of our ancient relationship with what can’t be seen, and asks why we have so insistently foreclosed on what we have always known – that there is crucial meaning and value in what, necessarily, cannot be proven. Again and again, in different ways, Held asks what forces bring us to a present moment. These forces, from particle physics to evolution, to revolution, to hauntings, to hope, to a gesture, to an error, to empathy, to desire… this is Held’s investigation; and the ways we choose and all the ways beyond our choosing, and all the ways love continues its work long past the span of a life.

The book that made me fall in love with reading

We fall in love with reading again and again (and often repeatedly with the same book). These are the books that recognise us, seize us, sometimes rescue us from an inner emergency unacknowledged in ourselves. When I was around 12 years old, in the sound of the washing machine and sitting on the bottom steps of the cellar, I finished reading Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. It was momentous to me that a character, after hundreds of pages, could reach the place they were born to reach and somehow, in doing so, mend something greater. There was at last a justice to all that the characters had experienced, endured, learned from. It was also my first real awareness of just how powerfully a book can transport us from the here-and-now (the washing machine!) to near-total submergence in a fictional world. And it was landscape too – realising I had fallen into an intimacy with places I would recognise for the rest of my life.

The book that made me want to become a writer

I first read Shakespeare’s King Lear when I was 15 and was electrified: its staggering faith in language, everything at stake. The fate of an entire kingdom, dynasties, loyalty, sanity, the afterlife of souls – everything dependent on a single sentence, eleven words – one could argue, a single word – as consequential as the A, C, G, T of our DNA. Set loose by those few words is the shocking confrontation of two irreconcilable systems and a shrieking collision of scale that could only be resolved by madness, revenge, violence, blinding… and imagination, love, hope. And similarly, Lear’s redemption relies on a single sentence of two words. This utter respect for the power of language – in all its duplicity, complexity, failure, redemption – was something I seemed to understand in every atom of me. And each time I re-read King Lear I am gutted again by the unassailable fact that the place of doubt is exactly the place of faith.

I first read Shakespeare’s King Lear when I was 15 and was electrified: its staggering faith in language, everything at stake

The book I return to time and time again

I first read T.S. Eliot’s The Four Quartets when I was about 14, and Stephen Mitchell’s translations of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies a few years later. Because these were my first experiences of a poem’s direct encounter with mystery – the unique human soul who must cry out – the language of these poems has always exerted a power over me. How much did I understand? Very little; nothing. It was a music I had never heard before and never could have imagined existing. And yet somehow it spoke to me. Much later I would come to understand that every poem is a poem of witness; every poem, a form of rescue – from amnesia of every sort, from every kind of disregard and indifference. And every poem is a witness to love that cannot wait – an entire life passes in a moment.

The book I can’t get out of my head

Reading W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz feels like inhabiting a dream where, word by word, we are being woven into a landscape, history, moral contingency, from which we will never awaken. Sebald’s fictional world is our world, but so intensely affecting that, until reading, we would never before have taken such bearings. There is not a word or punctuation alien to its purpose. It is a book so saturated in history, it is easy to wonder who casts the shadow, the living or the dead. It is a book one can get lost in, but not in the usual sense; in our immersion, we can drop the thread of the plot, drift in a landscape where everything is liminal, nothing is liminal. In Austerlitz, we are at the heart of grief, which of course is the very heart of all that situates us morally.

The book that changed the way I think about the world

My books require much research, so most of my reading is non-fiction, where a single fact can change everything and suddenly affirm you have finally reached the right depth. This research changes the way I think about the world, or confirms something so essential that a web of connections emerges, a magnification of mystery. But there are also books that change our relation to the world by strengthening our resolve, our courage. Books that witness war, that seek justice, that work their quiet defiance across generations. Poems that witness political oppression – spit in the eye of the oppressor, a message left for the others. Everyone will have their own list and mine is too long to even barely begin here… Nadezhda Mandelstam’s two-volume memoir, Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned; Etty Hillesum’s An Interrupted Life, the poems of Nâzım Hikmet…

The book that changed the way I think about the novel

The structure of every book is entirely itself – like the body, like a fractal – individual, born with its own task to fulfil. In this way, a book’s structure is its own form of persuasion, its own proof – W.G. Sebald’s fiction, Benjamin Labatut’s The Maniac… And I have always been rapt by books that say as little as possible in order to express everything that matters: concise, subversive, intimate, a voice whispering in our ear. This intensity makes it hard to turn away. Marguerite Yourcenar’s Coup de Grace, Marguerite Duras’ memoir The War, Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Camus’ The Stranger. Longer, but with similar intensity – Sandor Marai’s Embers, Stefan Zweig’s Beware of Pity.

The Booker-nominated book everyone should read

Despite their great differences, Sybille Bedford’s Jigsaw, Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, and, perhaps surprisingly, Benjamin Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World can be said to call to each other across the decades. These novels masterfully express the wilderness of seismic historic change; they witness history rarely articulated in this way - a witnessing that is simultaneously passionate and dispassionate – in order to create a space for the reader to confront shifting and agitated borders, hierarchies, values – political, economic, philosophical – that are the consequences of war. These novels document how profoundly and comprehensively war recalibrates the world: how we live, how we think, how we feel, how we think we should feel. Jigsaw is crammed with visceral detail and overflows with life. The Remains of the Day is almost the polar opposite – a novel of heart-clenching restraint which illustrates its own astonishing trust in language – the novel is so tightly constructed that only a few words, a single sentence, is needed to shockingly crack open the novel’s entire moral, psychological, political complexity; then the crevasse seals shut again. It is a superb example of calibration and restraint (readers will ache with the painful meaning of the protagonist’s unconscious usage of ‘Miss Kenton’ and ‘Mrs Benn’ – never interchangeably, though referring to the same woman).

When We Cease to Understand the World shocks in its own way – fragmented, acute, and uncompromising in its insistence that we face the consequences of our seismic re-making of the world. It’s difficult to express the specific oxygen of a historical moment and each of these novels achieves this very differently, but each with deep poignancy and with everything at stake.