How important is music to your poetry?
I find it impossible to listen to music while writing poetry: I always end up wanting to sing along and bob my head. However, it’s important to me that poetry “sounds” right and in time, so in that respect, music is very important to my poetry. It has to sound good, not just look good.
When you require renewal, is there a particular poem or book that you return to? A particular author?
Invictus, by William Ernest Henry. I know it’s a cliché, but when I’m feeling depressed, I don’t have much time for worrying about a poem’s reputation, only for how it’s going to make me feel, and there are few things more comforting than that final stanza:
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.
I also like to take refuge in works that are so familiar to me that I feel as safe inside them as I do in my own home. I feel this way about Shakespeare and Jane Austen.
What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?
I do not like the way a poem that seems passable one day magically becomes dreadful the next. It’s like being demoralised by one’s own brain. Virginia Woolf says it best:
Anyone moderately familiar with the rigours of composition will not need to be told the story in detail; how he wrote and it seemed good; read and it seemed vile; corrected and tore up; cut out; put in; was in ecstasy; in despair; had his good nights and bad mornings,’ etc.
What poets changed the way you thought about writing?
Shabbir Banoobhai.
When I first started reading Banoobhai’s work in high school, the images in my head would always appear as through a lens made of blue glass. He made me see that poetry could have colour in ways that were different from what I expected, or from what I had been taught to expect. I should point out, however, that since then I have never had the same experience with any colour other than blue, and that only certain poets have this colour. Ezra Pound's rip-offs of Li Bai are blue. So is Pound's own poetry. Li Bai, on the other hand, is not blue at all; at least not in any of the translations I have read.
How does a poem begin?
Poems begin when I see something that disturbs me. Often, it’s something really small, like a dead bird, a vase of flowers, or a cupboard with breathing holes cut into it, but I will spend a lot of time agonising about why that particular object appears that way in that particular moment.
