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ELIZABETH SEWELL: About three weeks ago, I suddenly had a revelation that all my dearest friends were failures, every one of them. I look around. One's just not being given tenure. One's being fired next year. One's a priest who never has any money. Wonderful people, and all of them failure.

So I suddenly thought of a poem to celebrate failure, which I'm going to say. And it has a lovely image, which is an image of our culture as a glass of champagne. And the bubbles go [IMITATES BUBBLING] up to the top and burst. And it says, the dear spirits, you see, puns on spirits, the alcohol, who are the dear spirits, go down to the bottom. And that's where we all are. I'm celebrating failure very sweetly, I hope, and gently.

SPEAKER: Because of the element of risk, the element that you could really grow?

ELIZABETH SEWELL: Yes, yes, that failure is a learning place, and success isn't.

SPEAKER: When you started to write, did you approach writing as such?

ELIZABETH SEWELL: I started to write when I was six. I mean, it makes me laugh. And my dear mother kept all my poems, and they are so funny. I mean, talk about failure. They are absolutely hilariously funny.

And of course, when you're that age, you don't think about it. And I always wanted to be a writer. And my good family said, look, you can't make your money that way. And they were right.

So you learn other ways. I've kept myself as an academic from time to time. I've also kept myself as a cook, and I'm a very good cook. Now, there, you need to be successful. I mean, there's no question about cheese souffle. It's either a success or a failure, and you'd better have it be a success.

But as you go on, I think in my 20s and 30s, I and my agents who had taken me on thought I was going to be a roaring success. Poor dears. Are they disillusioned? It's much worse for them because they have to make money out of it. I don't. But I mean, clearly, I'm not a success at all. And that's just fine. I mean, that's the best possible thing to be.

SPEAKER: Well, now, wait a minute. What are you defining as a success?

ELIZABETH SEWELL: Money, fame, being well-known, getting your book reviewed, getting your books published. I mean, I've had 10 books published, and I can't get any more published now at all because they need now to make profits. All the publishers, as you probably know, have been bought up by the great corporations who think of profit properly. That's their job. But it's not my job to make profits for them or me.

So now I'm publishing my own books. I've decided to start publishing my own work. And I've got one launched, which is a collection of essays. And I'm all ready now to do the second, which is a third collection of poetry. And I'm just going to go on doing this from now on. But that's what I mean by being a success or a failure. I mean, in my year-- I mean, here I am, I'm in my early 60s, and I've published 10 books. And now I can't get a thing published by anybody.

SPEAKER: Is that also a part of the academic versus artist?

ELIZABETH SEWELL: No, not really, because I've always straddled that line. You see, in my palmy days, I was published by university presses and commercial presses. And now, neither of them will publish. No, I think it's a commentary really on what's happening in the reading and book and publishing world.

And it's also that I do different things. Once I've done something, I don't go on doing it. So I start-- I do funny things. And I don't-- I mean, I wouldn't publish my stuff if somebody sent it to me. So you just have to be a self-entrepreneur, I think.

SPEAKER: How do you get your ideas? I mean, one of your big books, Field of Nonsense, deals with the idea of nonsense in literature--

ELIZABETH SEWELL: Yes, yes.

SPEAKER: --specifically Edward Lear and--

ELIZABETH SEWELL: Yes.

SPEAKER: --Lewis Carroll.

ELIZABETH SEWELL: Well, aren't you nice to have done some homework?

SPEAKER: Well--

ELIZABETH SEWELL: [INAUDIBLE] delights me that people--

SPEAKER: But [INAUDIBLE]--

ELIZABETH SEWELL: --have read anything mine.

SPEAKER: --what was it that first got you into the area of nonsense?

ELIZABETH SEWELL: Well, my first-- when I was doing my dissertation, which was on two really very difficult, and naughty, and fascinating French poets, curiously enough, Lewis Carroll was awfully helpful. I became interested in mathematics and logic. And you see, he, of course, was a mathematician and a logician. I found him just so helpful. I made friends with him. And I've always loved both of them. And I wanted to find out why.

Nonsense wasn't poetry, which it clearly isn't in one sense, and why it isn't madness. It's something else. You see, I thought maybe it's a little independent construction or universe on its own. And in fact, that is, I think, what it turned out to be. It was how I worked with it.

SPEAKER: Well, a lot of people, I imagine, who read Through the Looking Glass and Alice in Wonderland would see that there is a structure there.

ELIZABETH SEWELL: Yes.

SPEAKER: There is a community--

ELIZABETH SEWELL: Very much.

SPEAKER: --a society that Carroll has set up.

ELIZABETH SEWELL: Yes, and it's just like ours. We're turning into a nonsense society. It's fascinating. More recently, I've been working on Carroll as a prophet of modern times, way before Kafka. People think Kafka's The Trial is one of the great prophecies. But my word, you look again, particularly Looking Glass, where there's heartlessness, the alienation of everybody, everything's manipulated, you've got to keep control. Are you dreaming it or is it dreaming you? It's extraordinarily like modern society and frightening.

SPEAKER: Frightening. Do you have a resolution for this, or is it just an observation?

ELIZABETH SEWELL: More poetry is, I think, the answer. You see, the nonsense is very careful to keep poetry, and beauty, and really, in a sense, imagination out. It's a very carefully enclosed and controlled thing. It's a game. And games, you can't allow passion. You can't allow emotion. You can't allow beauty. I mean, the whole business is to do your technique beautifully and to win.

SPEAKER: But isn't that a part of poetry too, technique and structure?

ELIZABETH SEWELL: Yes, it is. It surely is. But I think the way I think of it is that that's 50% of it. And the other 50% is crazy, dream, madness, all that other gorgeous imagining side.

And poetry has this wonderful gift of balancing the two. I wouldn't want to live in a world that was all dream and craziness. My goodness. I mean, that would be a nightmare of another order.

SPEAKER: [CHUCKLES] Do you see in the students that you teach a possibility toward getting that kind of passion?

ELIZABETH SEWELL: Oh yes. Oh yes. Mostly now, I'm working with older people. I'm doing adult work. I'm out of the classroom as such.

But, I mean, young people always have it in them. They may have been-- after, what, about 12 years of education, they've forgotten they have an imagination. And you have to send them back to find it, and they're scared.

And the further on they get-- the really scared ones are the graduate students. You ask a graduate student to do an imaginative job, ooh, they're petrified. [CHUCKLES] But they rather enjoy it once they do it. You can always find it again in the young if they have been persuaded out of it by the training they've had. And of course, the better the training, the more they will have been persuaded out of it.

SPEAKER: How could you say to an average listener, let's say, who hasn't thought about writing in a while, but who might want to, what are the steps toward discovering that passion?

ELIZABETH SEWELL: Start describing things. Just observe. Observing would be the first. I'd say observing, and I'd say remembering. Go back to some scene perhaps that was beautiful or significant maybe in your childhood and describe it. You'll be astonished at the precision of your own memory.

And I would certainly say dreams. Be interested in your dreams. Crazy as they are, be interested in them. Watch them and remember them, because most of us just let our dreams get by us. We don't pay any attention to them.

Those would be three places to start, at least. And don't, for heaven's sake, worry about grammar. And if you're going to do poetry, don't think it's got to rhyme. I don't know why people think you have to rhyme.

SPEAKER: [CHUCKLES] What about vocabulary though? I mean, I see myself-- as I've gotten away from reading a lot of literature, as I have to go about workaday business, that my vocabulary is restricted. Poets obviously have this large world of words.

ELIZABETH SEWELL: They do. They do have a bigger vocabulary, I think. And they have to have-- well, it's a matter sometimes of just suddenly coming on.

I remember not so long ago I came on this lovely word, which, of course, I knew. The word was "nimble." And I thought, I never say anything is nimble. I have to go around for days thinking what I can say. Somebody is nimble. What a beautiful word.

So maybe it's just a matter of being interested in words and reading too-- read more poets, because you learn. I mean, even when you're learning a foreign language, they say to you, poetry is a wonderful way of enlarging your vocabulary. So, I mean, it's really just simple. Just I would read.

SPEAKER: Who do you read?

ELIZABETH SEWELL: Heavens. At the moment I'm reading Henry James, of all things. We, of course, weren't asked to read Henry James in school or college. And I think you should read all novelists. All great novelists, you shouldn't read until you're 45.

And obviously, you shouldn't read Henry James till you're 60. [CHUCKLES] I'm having an orgy of Henry James. It's gorgeous. I've just finished-- now, I'm in the middle of The Ambassadors.

SPEAKER: Perhaps you have to be 60 to get through Henry James.

ELIZABETH SEWELL: I do. No, you do, I think, because when I was 30, I thought, what a horrible old bore. I can't read this man. And everybody was scandalized, saying, [GASPS] such a great novelist.

But it just shows you should be patient with things, doesn't it? If you don't like something when you're 30, wait till you're 60 and try it again. And I think that's true of poets, too, because not all poets are there for you. Some are there for you when you're 16, and some when you're 30, and some when you're 50. Some go all the way, but not all that many.