How did you first engage with poetry?
It was somewhat spontaneous. I grew up in a house which had books, and my sister was an avid reader, but I took to films and TV more readily. These fed into how I viewed literature, in that BBC adaptations of famous novels felt underwhelming to me. As I entered my teenage years, I became more and more obsessive about music. At this time, download culture was still illegal and it wasn’t unusual to buy CDs, which contained inlay cards with lyrics. I felt a tremendous emotional resonance towards the visual arrangement of text, and the space between lines, and began writing what I considered song lyrics. Eventually, probably compounded by the fact I can’t play an instrument, I became comfortable with the idea of poetry and accepted that these “lyrics” could be a creative expression in and of themselves. This led me to go to a chain bookstore and pick the two poetry books with the best covers (I was a teenager) which happened to be an edition of collected poems by AE Houseman and an edition of Lewis Carrol’s poetry, neither of which had any influence on me. I’m still fond of them, though, as an introduction.
My love of visual media and music had already led to a precocious interest in the historical narratives and creative practices bannered under “avant-garde”. My passion for literature took off when I found its literary equivalents. Foremost were poets such as Frank O’Hara and Bernadette Mayer, novelists such as Kathy Acker and Burroughs, as well as that seeming golden era of concrete poetry exemplified by Henri Chopin, Brion Gysin and Bob Cobbing, who I found a little later.
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