How important is music to your poetry?
Listening to music certainly enriches my life, and I listen to music almost every day, loud, often singing and dancing, often whilst editing (not usually whilst composing). Most of the music I listen to is instrumental, extremely beautiful, existential and blissful to my ears, which carries over into the mood of my writing. On the other hand, walking, looking at art and reading probably have more of a direct impact on the content and form of my writing.
When you require renewal, is there a particular poem or book that you return to? A particular author?
I have more than a few favourites. Without going to the bookshelf I will pick out three to limit this answer. Any of P. Inman’s books to cleanse the soul: for a gong bath, for a sit-down walk. Then Robert Grenier’s Sentences and Matt Welton’s We Needed Coffee… for bliss, deep imagery, and brainwork that’s intense but not taxing.
Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?
Not really. I’ve long considered poetry to be rich in its possibilities, a really exciting place, not just biography or triviality in lineated form, or something dragged out at weddings and funerals. A lot of people’s conceptions of poetry is based on the stuff they read at school. And in the UK most of the twentieth and twenty-first century stuff is really the study of the topic of the poem and the spot-featuring of the poetic devices – that is to say that poetry’s not given a fair shot at school because of the selection of poems on the syllabus. I was lucky enough to come across/be directed to poetry that breaks the mould early on and see its connection to the wider picture of innovation in the arts.
What are you working on?
Funny, if you’d asked me this a month or so ago I would have said nothing at all, and then all of a sudden, after a long barren patch, something clicks and you start writing again (though it has to be said, I’m not writing as prolifically as I used to and that’s a strange space to be in). I’m working on a new sequence of snowballs, a form I’ve worked with before. Snowballs are perhaps most associated with Oulipo and usually have ten lines. Typically, in a snowball, line 1 has one letter, line 2 two letters and so on until ten letters in the tenth line. Rather than letters I’ve changed the form by increasing the amount of words per line. There’s a lot of flexibility in the form and it shares a similarity to the sonnet in its effects. A few months ago I finished editing my collection it is like toys but also like video taped in a mall, which is out with Pamenar Press. I’m really pleased with it. It’s a series of 201 two-line minimalist poems, which took around five years to write and edit.
How did you first engage with poetry?
Although retrospectively I can remember reading poetry as a young child, a standout moment as a writer was reading Salvador Dali’s poem Dandled Brochure and other poems by surrealists in the Surrealist Manifesto when I was about 16. e.e. cummings books were around the house also, amongst a small selection – they were important too. These poems confirmed for me that poetry (writing) could be stretched, and then I wrote and wrote in a multitude of styles and forms, many of which were my own experiments. Around the same time that I read the Surrealist Manifesto I studied Keats at school and enjoyed it, although not as much as the surrealist writing – joy over moodiness most days for me. I’d cite these things as initially turning me on to the ethereal power of poetry.
