Interview for ‘Writewords’, April 2005
Tell us all about your writing
background…
My writing background is
primarily one of not writing. In
childhood, I never thought of myself as a potential author. My parents had no books in the house, other
than a Gideon Bible closed in a drawer.
The first book I owned was Middleton’s Gardening Guide. In a way, those are still my formative texts.
When I did start writing (see
below) I joined an excellent and supportive group in Putney (run by Carol
Fisher) and, later, the Blue Nose Poets in North London (Martyn Crucefix, Sue
Hubbard, Denis Timm). Till then, I’d
been working and writing in relative isolation, without the usual English
degree and lacking any contact with university literature or creative writing
MAs. It was only in sharing ideas and
words with other enthusiasts, in a grass-roots community of writers, that I
first came to glimpse how vast the ocean of Humanities actually is.
My debut collection of poems, Shrapnel and Sheets,
appeared in 1996 via Gladys Mary Coles at Headland. The PBS Recommendation it received was an immense encouragement
to me. I’ve several other collections,
including: Bosco, a book-length sequence on deforestation; Lepidoptera,
an experimental ‘anthology’ combining prose and scientific poetry; and The
Stamina of Sheep (based on a Year of the Artist project for Thames,
Havering and Essex) which must be the only book of poems ever to have won a
‘Best Fiction’ prize!
I recently completed Heavy Water (Enitharmon) and Half
Life (Heaventree), sibling collections both launched on 26 April 2004 to
mark the 18th anniversary of the Chernobyl explosion. These publications form a diptych, two
facets of a single extended piece, and are derived from eyewitness accounts of the disaster collected by
journalist Svetlana Alexievich in her book Voices from Chernobyl. The repercussions of that fatal morning, the
reverberations of those stories, are far from played out. I’m still absorbing, myself, the personal
impact of researching and writing that work.
What other work do you, besides
‘conventional’ writing?
As an ecologist and lapsed
physicist, I’m forever exploring the interface between poetry and ecology/
science/ war through a variety of forms: with ‘open-door’ articles, as well as
within the stanzas of poems. It’s those
interfaces which hold the key – or at least the imprint of the key – to grappling
with the tragedies and opportunities of this fast, interwoven world.
Day to day, I engage with an
eclectic mix of freelance writing, workshopping, competition judging,
researching and essay-writing. I’m a
writing tutor in schools, and a literacy and museums consultant; I teach for
Arvon and Poetryclass; I moonlight as a voice-and-performance trainer, using a
pick-n-mix approach of my own design; I co-founded, and run, both ShadoWork
(experimental collaborative performance) and writers inc. (a London-based
writing organisation). For 10 years I
nursed my magazine, The Bound Spiral.
It died anyway, but had, I hope, a noble illness. I’ve written songs for an R&B artist,
though the bottom’s since fallen out the UK music business. I also play a little guitar (and I don’t
mean a small one…).
A few years back, I began
actively placing poems in public places.
Communal sites are set to become important ‘books’ of the future. Put in a good spot, a poem might get thousands
of readers each day – though, of course, the reception of poetry isn’t just
about numbers. My first big project of
this kind was at the Imperial War Museum, under the Poetry Places scheme,
where I devised Search and Create, the museum’s only poetry residency to
date. Walk around the atrium there, and
you’ll see shrapnel-scraps of text imbedded in niches and behind
artefacts. My mice, I call them,
tripping up their elephantine, exhibitional counterparts. I still find it uncanny, seeing my poems on
display like that. No matter how idiosyncratic
the work is – however much of you is written all over it – it always
feels as if it must have come from someone else. I’m not sure I ever want to ‘get over’ that feeling: for all the
inferiority it implies, it’s quite a generative mode. During my time at the museum, I also got my first commission for
libretto. I was asked to contribute a
short piece to the BBC’s “Classic Challenge” programme featuring Stephen
Warbeck (of Shakespeare in Love fame).
A rush job, they said. I had
half an hour to write it.
Currently, I’m implementing
site-specific work for institutions as varied as Southwell Workhouse and
Imperial War Museum North, where my lines can be found busily fusing with wall
and exhibit. The Workhouse is a superb
location for creativity. Its bald
demeanour (walls, ceilings, stairwells, floors) make it profoundly receptive to
silence. The echoey structure of the
house serves, paradoxically, to amplify silence. In a peculiar way, I feel poems do that too – amplify silence
through sound. I’ve just finished a
lovely project at BBC Radio 3, its first poetry residency, engaging orchestras
and their endangered instruments as part of the Listen Up! festival. Silence – the potentials of silence, even
within activity and sound – became a theme in that work, too.
Doing this kind of work isn’t the
same as gaining a conventional book-based reputation; but it can influence the
‘unconverted’ public in powerful ways.
It also shows that poetry can be alive in a variety of contexts. In this respect, I seem to have become
something of a ‘frontier’ man of poetry residencies! That’s not to say I’m against paper. Apart from feeling sorry for trees, how could I be? I try to maintain a strong public presence
through such outlets as The Spectator, The Independent and Resurgence,
as well as via other media (BBC World Service, etc). I’ve just completed stints as the Poetry
Book Society’s inaugural pamphlet selector and as Chair of the Advisory Fellows
of the Royal Literary Fund. I lecture
at Oxford Brookes University, offering students thought-provoking 2D/ 3D
visualizations for essay structure.
What’s left of me is given over to writing poetry – usually for an
audience of one (or, if you’re a believer, One).
So, all in all, in spite of being
self-fuelled and working mostly from home, my writing time and brain-space have
become extremely precious. Freelancing
can absorb all your freedom, but it does propel you into a new relationship
with yourself. I’ve become more focused
and productive, more adventurous. But
it’s also precarious. You’re rarely
more than a few months away from nil income.
Without the grants, the odd boost of a big prize, it would all fall
through for me financially. I had more
time on my hands, I think, when I held regular jobs; but I also had less
purpose, had the sharp edges knocked off me, became more regular myself.
How, when and why did you first
start writing?
As I said earlier, I came to
writing alarmingly late. Having
graduated in physics at Cambridge, I later taught science in a secondary
school. I went on to do a PhD in
opto-electronics at University College London and (after a break) completed
further studies at Middlesex University on the environment and (informally)
literature. I’ve also been an organic
farm-hand in Ireland and a one-man band on the Paris Metro. In other words, for the first chunk of my
adult life, most of my ‘writing’ was done with chalk on blackboard, or with an
ion beam on a lithium niobate crystal, or a plectrum across strings, or with
goat’s milk against the wrong side (the out-side) of a milk-pail. Reading the biographies of successful
writers, you do get the distinct impression they all wrote poetry in the womb,
gained PhDs at Oxford with such titles as Glittering Gimlets and The Ancient
Mariner, and could boast a heady body of work by the time they were
30. All I had at 30 was a
body. Having said that, I do feel there
are some (though not that many) advantages in coming to literature with
a combination of proto-maturity and tabula rasa. I’m also lucky in being a fast learner and (generally) a quick
drafter. You’ll probably hate me for
this but I seem to manage, most years, between 60 and 120 poems a year; so
maybe I have a heady body after all.
Who are your favourite writers
and why?
I don’t have favourites, as a
rule. Even when I do, they shift and
change. I do refer to great writers, of
course; but I prefer to focus on strong pieces of work, rather than on who
wrote them. I don’t believe in the
death of the author (even if we’re heading that way, it’s prematurely
announced); it’s just that the moment we list/ classify/ fossilise ‘the best’
we’ve begun to exclude the worthwhile, the very good.
How did you get your first
publication….?
By sealing an envelope and
licking a stamp, just like everyone else.
I think it was with ‘First Time’ magazine, edited by Josephine
Austin. I got a proper pound note for
it (I held it up to the light). Bless
that woman. Although I wasn’t quite
stupid enough to frame it, I was unfortunately sufficiently sentimental to
archive it.
What’s the worst thing about
writing….?
The various ways in which the
writing scene can fail to be a meritocracy.
It’s not a total failure, by any means; and, in any case, the notion of
‘quality’ will always be subjective, socially constructed, depending on
networks, trends, movements, Zeitgeist.
But I do remember being told (either by Carol Fisher or Howard Sergeant)
that if you got some comp prizes and mags under your belt, someone would
eventually notice you and want your book.
I was led to believe it wasn’t good practice – or etiquette – to be too
pushy or self-absorbed. None of that
seems to apply much anymore, if it ever did.
Reputations can still be built quietly, perhaps; but apparently the
rocket fuel is to market vigorously, establish your own phalanx of influence,
and have some well-placed ambassadors/ agents constantly pushing your
work. One aspect of this I certainly don’t
like (and this probably says more about me than anything else) is that game of
being forever on ‘literary guard’: incessantly sounding and looking the part,
always coming across as someone of learning, one who constantly refers to life
through the filters of literature.
There’s much more to work, to life, than that; but I sometimes sense
you’re dismissed or looked down upon if you show yourself as merely impassioned
or as having ordinary concerns. Poetry
now is sometimes a little too engrossed with itself, with linguistic
intelligence. I’d defend that attribute
to the death; but not at the expense of emotional intelligence. On top of all this (see what a can of worms
you’ve opened) our culture, beyond a small enclave of reader-poets, isn’t
actually listening much to its poets at the moment. Given that poetry can absorb anything you throw at it, demanding
the best of you – indeed, everything you have to give it – you might reasonably expect, in return, to make a
measurable impact somewhere.
Ultimately, even when the evidence seems to the contrary, you just have
to trust that you do. You certainly
have a central part to play in the effects of the creative process on you. These effects do ripple out; and those
ripples can’t be quelled – not altogether.
If I’m wrong about that, the only responses available to most of us are
endless striving, despair or Zen acceptance.
For myself, I keep on believing that great poetry, like all great
literature, can take the pulse of a civilisation. Wherever, however, such poetry occurs – it matters.
And the best? What was your breakthrough moment?
Breakthrough? I’m flattered that you think I’ve had
one! In poetry, the rostrum of fame is
decidedly small – only a very few have ‘broken through’ in the way you’re
implying. I know it’s canny to always come
across as though you’re one of those writers (it certainly pays to play
the ‘self-fulfilling-prophecy’ card); but with print runs of under 1000 (not
bad, actually, for poetry) I certainly don’t feel the subject of a
breakthrough; and, even if I were, I’d have to ask “into what”? Or “what is it, exactly, that was
broken”? Does ‘breaking through’ mean
your phone keeps ringing? Or that you
get the peachy commissions (millennium, royal wedding, etc); that you can make
a living from your art; that you’re culturally ‘safe’ for mass distribution;
that you’re celebrity-consistent?
Letting the freelancer’s PR
instinct kick in for a moment, I suppose I ought to be saying my breakthroughs
were winning the Bridport Prize, or the third time I landed the London Writers
Competition, or winning the Arvon Prize in 2002, or securing consecutive
fellowships with the Royal Literary Fund (= blissful security and time to
write), or my residency at the war museum where (for the first time) my phone
did actually start to ring, or the day Poetry London placed Heavy
Water among the top five collections of the year, thus giving those
testimonies a small, but real, chance of being more widely read. But I’m trying to get away from that
career-/achievement-based conception of turning points. That day I picked up a pencil and made
something entirely my own – now that was a breakthrough. Or the morning I stood bolt upright in the
physics lab, struck by the sensation that the experiments of literature had
become far more interesting to me than those of physics, far closer to my
marrow. Or all the times I’ve sensed
language as a constant falling-short – but miraculously so. Or, yesterday, when I became enraged by a
freak typo that had crept (in spite of all reasonable efforts) into a piece I’d
just published and, tracking down the correct phrase through Google, teeth
gritted, found myself unexpectedly face to face with a beautiful contemplation
on the genuine nature of human success.
So, I try to keep open to the
fact that it isn’t only great poems that make us want to change and be
changed. We can discover that
transformative energy everywhere, and in just about every one, if we
trust the cosmos. It is in our
selves. I am a person, first and
foremost. The growth modes of the person:
those are the real breakthroughs, the best moments.
What kind of response do you get
from audiences? Does it influence your
writing?
I’m told I read quite well. I do put a lot of work into it. I simply can’t understand readers who seem
unconcerned about their audibility or delivery. Equally, I’m deeply turned off when performances become gimmicky
or slick. I don’t have a great voice;
but, when I’m reading, I invoke the poem as an independent being possessed of
its own existence, its own purposes. My
ego has to get out of the way. It’s the
poem, not the author, that speaks.
Moreover, I always write or edit
with a sense of audience, the idea that to properly exist the text will have to
be heard or seen. At the very least, it
must be formed in that small cavern of the mouth: must be cast off on air,
launched into the swells of sound.
After all, a poem both shapes – and is shaped by – breath. It is somatic as well as intellectual. If inspiration is the breath in, the poem is
the breath out.
The very best readings, though,
are pheromonal – when the room fills with the sweet subliminal scent of aroused
communication. When that happens,
audiences help to make the poem. Their
response becomes a hologram within you, storing in your bones (and in your ear)
the shape and smack of human interaction.
What inspires you?
Phew. Where do I start? I do everything humanly possible to entice poetry’s bolt to
strike. I keep journals, notebooks,
albums. I file away aphorisms and
quotes according to author, date and subject.
I compile personal mini-dictionaries of unusual words, slang and (an
Italian equivalent to) ‘bearlachas’. I
practise telling lies. I raid memory –
that larder of the brain. I read Dante
on the Underground and Rilke in the bath.
I’m a Benjamin Franklin forever launching my kite into the cloudless
blue.
But,
more often than not, the process of poetry seems inexorably meteorological – a
kind of spontaneous condensation in the dark spaces outside consciousness, a
thick vapour that creeps under the door of your brightly-lit life and demands
that you investigate. The rest is
trying to get the blasted door to open.
Unless the poem comes fully formed, it’s work. Heavy, delicate work.
That immense heave and heft of tackling sound, using little more than
the thin guy-lines of language. Often,
those black little marks can seem as elusive and refractory as live ants on a
blank sheet of paper. Actually, I
sometimes think a large part of the reason I’m a poet is my innate inability to
say quite what I mean. A lot of the
time, I don’t know if what is happening is actual inspiration or just an
intense feeling. Not until after it’s
happened. In that sense, poetry is the
fifth element: the element of surprise.
For the writer, as well as for the reader/listener. Writing is a bit like learning to gaze in a
pool – to catch yourself unawares.
Inspiration, though, can be over-rated. Writing isn’t always as romantic or intense
as I’ve just described. Much of it is
pretty down to earth. Actually,
anything (not just our emotional highs and lows) can inspire: a shard of
overheard conversation, a scrap of an idea, a faint or redolent memory. Other people’s poems, too, of course – those
that strike you as a lucid confirmation of something you already knew, but had
somehow never got round to thinking.
Whenever that happens I want to join in the conversation the poem
started, by adding my own thruppence of words.
Language inspires language. I
love the way, for instance, how in poetry “that rope of copper” can, by some
linguistic miracle, become heavier than “a copper rope”.
I
do keep an eye on science. Science
inspires me because I’ve experienced it at the coal face; but also because
poetry and science are kin. They both
ask deeper questions of what is superficially observed and, by the same token,
both adopt a hypothetical and provisional stance towards what they try to
understand. They each demand that we
pay full attention. What’s more, the
rigour and the precision of the scientist isn’t foreign to the poet, just as
the faith-leaps of poetry are far from excluded from the drawing-boards of
science. Poetry and science are not
tribal arch-rivals, but kissing cousins.
Certain poems/ poets will, I expect, inspire us more
often than others (for me, Emily Dickinson is one). They’re a little like those people who make toast at 7am, who
induce us to stir in our beds, perhaps at first begrudgingly; but soon we’re
all dashing down the stairs to queue at the toaster. And I’m not talking just about master chefs here: anyone – or any
thing – can deliver that next wake-up aroma.
During one of my classroom visits, for example, after asking a class to
invent a futuristic voice, a bejewelled student raised a heavily-ringed hand
and (with a face brimming with good old Anglo-Saxon feeling) ‘encouraged me’ to
do my own exercise. I did; and the
resulting poem, Gene, went on to win 3rd prize in this year’s
National. Angels often come disguised
as devils.
Do
you have a writing routine? A place
that’s special?
First:
my desk, often straight from bed or mid-afternoon. Second: the universe, anytime.
Do
you address particular themes or issues in your writing? Where do you get your ideas from?
Family. Loss. Love. War.
The illusions and confirmations of sense and experience. The pressure generated by insight and its
simultaneous insistence on taxidermy and flight. The potentials of silence, of absence, even when the thing is
present. Ecology. Technology.
History (we seem so focused on topicality and the present, I’m concerned
for the past’s future…) Most of all:
awareness, paying attention – which, in the end, is what all art is really
about. Literature (the real stuff) is
one of the chief ways a culture stays awake.
Naturally, as a poet, I’m also fascinated by metaphor, the way
everything becomes everything else.
That’s the engine-room of my writing, one of its major subjects. Metaphor is never far from reality; or
rather, should I say, isn’t reality always on the verge of metaphor? I’m much engaged, too, with style and
form. For a while now, I’ve been
obsessed with unrhymed couplets, tercets and quatrains: those wonderful spear-,
signpost- and coffin-shaped boxes. To
balance that, it seems, I’ve become increasingly involved with the fluid use of
voice in modern poetry and the characteristic eclecticism one finds in
contemporary writing (for more, Google ‘Poeclectics’). Some of these concerns, especially those
involving narrative, will be more obviously present in my poems than others;
but they are all spurs that my flanks recognise.
One last issue. Most writers know it’s usually best to avoid
signalling, or spelling out, meaning.
What is less obvious is that this is much more than a simplistic
adherence to ‘show don’t tell’. Indeed,
the sentiments and significances of a situation (real, imagined or abstract)
are already there, in the relationships (the ‘angles’) between people, things
and words… who did/ said what, when, how and to whom. Those relationships – related by the author through perception
and/or imagination – constitute a kind of geometry. I call it “the geometry of experience”, and it’s one of the key
forces, or instincts, behind composition.
This geometry draws a vessel in the mind, in the heart. That’s all the writer need do. The reader fills it for herself.
Any tips for new writers…?
Yes! A thirteen-point plan:
1.
When
sending your work to a magazine editor, never enclose an A9 SAE for 18 pp of
foolscap verse typed out in 6-point Braggadocio. Anyone doing that (or anything like it) should be made to fold an
entire telephone directory, page by page, in a dimly lit cellar, into perfect
1cm squares.
2.
Never
dismiss anyone as ‘rubbish’. Never see
another writer as just an adversary.
3.
Remember:
compared to the TV producer or celebrity, the poet has no power whatsoever –
and all the power in the world.
4.
Be
wary of any writing or performance that’s just a cavalry charge of the ego.
5.
Don’t
believe it when people say poetry is kaput.
For an art-form that’s meant to be in its last throes, there’s an awful
lot of it around. But we DO need more
readers …
6.
Read
everything.
7.
Keep
a journal. I forget most things: my
journal doesn’t.
8.
Take
your time. Don’t rush publication. The good poet is slowly discovered; the bad
poet is slowly found out.
9.
Be
yourself, not what ‘the scene’ would have you be. If you fish for fame, expect to catch old boots.
10.
Make
your art your hobby, not your profession; then make your hobby your life. (But put your person first.)
11.
Make
rooms for silence.
12.
Mistrust
failure as much as success. Beckett:
“Fail again, fail better”.
13.
Always
mistrust a writer who says clever things about writers.
What
would be your dream writing job?
Anything
that felt like opening a family restaurant in a fast-food mall. Something in which I could simply (and
invisibly) provide the facilitating inch from which all concerned could take
their own particular creative mile.
What’s
next for you?
I’ve
just been approached by a film company, wanting to make a poem-based film about
Chernobyl using Heavy Water. In
spite of the company’s excellent reputation, no one so far seems to want to
finance the film; perhaps because the idea’s much too far from ‘art as
entertainment’? And this at a time when
the government (along with James Lovelock) want more nuclear power stations
along our coasts, black as flies around a rind, and the world generally remains
as much in thrall to oil as the Neanderthals were to the first cudgel or
camp-fire. Few civilisations can have
had more covert dark to process than ours; and yet, we seem more concerned with
turning up the lights than we are with enlightenment. I hope I’m proved wrong, but in the end perhaps the only global
‘organisation’ willing and able to pay full attention to the environment, to
take decisive action about it, will be the planet herself. Gaia is set to become our greatest revolutionary. I’m really examining, as person[writer] as
well as writer[person], where I stand in all this.
Meanwhile, I’m mugging up for an
Arts Council England project ‘Science in Poetry’. For some time, I’ve been addressing the arts-science duality in
my work. I’m keen to write poems that
move the listener, yet address the technological problems and opportunities of
our age; I’m hoping for poems that encapsulate individual corpuscles of
scientific perception whilst sending ‘waves’ through an audience with their
performance and resonance. I believe
science and poetry can successfully co-exist in this way, but not through the
‘injection’ of science into poems in an arbitrary manner, or as a kind of
technological name-dropping. The
science has to be fully absorbed into the creative writing process, so that
they attain a negotiated co-habitation, an organic balance. These poems will form the spine of my next
book with Enitharmon, Flowers of Sulphur. I’m also trying to get round to completing a book-length sequence
on Monte Cassino and the Second World War, relegated to a back-burner for well
over a decade now. For most other
things, I’m trying not to look more than a few hours ahead. I just
try to live well and snatch a few hours’ shut-eye.