What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?
By pushing at the limits and finding a language worthy of yearning, poetry can do much. It needs to stay keen, nimble. A salutary reminder of the multi-directionality required can be gleaned from a reading of Heller Levinson and Will Alexander’s ‘Dialogics’.
How does your work first enter the world? Do you have a social group or writers group that you work ideas and poems with?
As a kind of tremor like a shark-fin circling, but aurally. A phrase, a certain rhythm, unexpected coherence if only for the duration of a line. There’s usually a hook, a narrative through which various impacts can take place and fruitfully deflect a piece, carry it forward. One starts with one’s own fixations and if you’re fortunate to have one or two friends, along with a highly attuned editor, then this certainly helps. I’ve been fortunate on both counts.
Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?
My understanding of what it can do, as opposed to other forms of verbal attack, certainly has. Poetry isn’t merely prose with aspirations, but a foray on the ineffable, a leap in the Kierkegaardian sense of not resting on the pre-determined or pre-determinable. It isn’t just born, in Yeats’ phrase, from “the shock of new material”, but from the propulsive shock of entanglement. There is an imaginative collapsing that inevitably takes place, from Blake’s well-known “world in a grain of sand” to Will Alexander’s “galvanic shock of the cosmos”. Interesting that I’ve used the same word – in considering poetry – three times here, telling. I’m also aware that my “consideration of poetry” simultaneously is and isn’t everything that it is capable of being up to this point.
How do you know when a poem is finished?
The poem should let you know. One doesn’t “abandon” a poem, it abandons the poet from the outset.
What are you working on?
I’ve just fallen off the cliff-edge of a collection that encompasses poems written over the last eight years or so, straddling a shorter collection of mine, Hiraeth, published by The Black Herald Press in 2016. It’s called Metanoia and is an attempt to mine end-of-life experiences, inflected and deflected by the likes of Vallejo, Paz and Kierkegaard among others.
