Tuesday 4 September 2018

Robin Durnford : part two


How did you first engage with poetry?

This is going to sound morbid, but after my father died in 2004 we needed some lines to put on his headstone. I wasn’t a poet then, just a mere PhD student, but I didn’t want something clichéd. I wrote some lines that people liked and ended up on the grave, so that was technically my first ‘publication.’ After that I just kept writing. I filled a whole notebook with verses that summer, trying to deal with the shock of what had happened (Dad died of a sudden death heart attack without any goodbyes to anyone), so that was the basis of my first book. I would say, though, that poetry was always in me. When I was a teenager I used to read poems from poetry anthologies and perform into hairbrushes in front of the mirror like a rock star. It’s just that where I came from poets were thought of as people from the olden days, all of whom were dead.


No comments:

Post a Comment