David Lynch interview

Nice interview with David Lynch here. I've long been a fan anyway, but he has all sorts of interesting things to say about art and creativity generally.

Sunspots on tour

Simon Barraclough is taking his recent collection Sunspots on tour - details here. I'll try to catch it in Nottingham or Oxford.

And if you need any more convincing, read this conversation with Simon from earlier this year.

Geoffrey Hill

There's a very interesting interview with Geoffrey Hill here, at The Isis. If I'm honest, when I read Hill it tends to be the earlier stuff, but I am gradually working my way through some of his more recent collections, and even when he's not entirely to my taste, he's his own poet. As he suggests in the interview, it's hard to see where he sits in the usually binary model of contemporary British poetry that usually gets talked about.

An interview with Mark Burnhope

Mark Burnhope is a poet, editor and disability activist born in 1982. He studied at London School of Theology before completing an MA in Creative Writing at Brunel University, London. His work has appeared in various magazines and anthologies in print and online, as well as two previous chapbooks: The Snowboy (Salt Publishing, 2011) and Lever Arch (The Knives Forks and Spoons Press, 2013). Mark co-edited Catechism: Poems for Pussy Riot (English Pen, 2012) with Sophie Mayer and Sarah Crewe, and Fit to Work: Poets Against Atos online (launched April 2013) with Sophie Mayer and Daniel Sluman, books which won a Saboteur Award and the Morning Star Award for Protest in Poetry consecutively. More recently, he became co-editor of Boscombe Revolution alongside Paul Hawkins. Mark can be found living in Boscombe, Dorset, with his wife Sarah, four stepchildren, two geckos, a greyhound and, occasionally, one or two stick insects or mantids.

Species is his first full collection of poems, and is available here.

You've published two chapbooks ahead of this, your first collection, but this already feels like something of a change in direction, or rather a settling upon your preferred direction, in the way that the poetry tackles disability issues head on. Would that be fair?

In a way. I definitely hope the book represents my settling into a more confident interest in poeming the non-normative body, embodiment and bodily experience. Disability is a focal point for that, but also the ways in which it impacts and interacts with sexuality and gender. My chapbooks touched on disability as part of a wider exploration of embodiment. Maybe they showed me playing with these ideas in the hope of one day doing something more conceptually coherent with them (Is that Species? I hope so). Three of the Snowboy poems were epistles to fictional characters who represented various aspects of my own embodiment (there are three more of those 'To My...' poems in Species). Poems like 'Wheelchair, Recast as a Site of Special Pastoral Interest' and 'Milo Won't Go in the Water' referenced disability in a (slightly) more clinical manner. But I was more nervous of the pitfalls then. An early draft of 'Wheelchair, Recast...' was my very first attempt at using the wheelchair in a poem, and I still transformed it into a monolithic landscape sculpture. It was still an irreverent symbol, a half-joke.

Lever Arch, my second chapbook, was partly inspired by Larry Eigner, whose poeming of the body through his Cerebral Palsy has massively influenced Disability/Crip Poetics in America. When I discovered that, and the disabled poets collected together in the online journal Wordgathering and anthology Beauty Is A Verb, I wanted to play with that sense of making poems using my 'hidden' bodily experiences: anxiety, neurodiverse thought and speech patterns, spacial recognition, memory, and particularly (in the case of Charles Olson's 'Projectivist Verse', Black Mountain poets, and particularly Eigner) breath and white space. So Lever Arch's approach to disability was more the aesthetics of disability than what the medical dictionary, and the medical model of disability, fixates on.

I'm more interested in disability as a social phenomenon than a medical one, though one arises from and impacts the other (when terms like 'social construct' fall into the wrong hands it's a problem): barriers caused not by our 'wrong' bodies but by a society which, instead of taking responsibility to alleviate struggles between us, blames us and makes us responsible for the 'mistakes' of our impairments. Maybe I'm more confident in that as an obsession now. That we 'other' humans into 'species' based on what we deem to be 'natural' and 'unnatural' is more clear than ever. There's also a conscious effort to include poems that came out of my disability activism and political protest against David Cameron's government, particularly Iain Duncan Smith's 'Welfare Reforms'. There are still poems about grief and loss after my wife Sarah's miscarriage ('The Snowboy' poem was an earlier attempt at that). It's all generally explored in, or alongside, or in the middle of, that natural history context.

I don't revert to self-mocking jokes about disability as easily as I used to, and when I do, it's angrier. The failings of so much contemporary white and non-disabled satire are rife: it so often draws together the privileged to laugh at subjects they feel are socially transformative, but ends up playing out as a kind of identity tourism meant to enrich their experience without affecting ours in any crucial way. The upshot is that there is no upshot: the status quo is maintained. Liberally-minded people are made to feel proud of themselves for thinking of those below them, again.

I don't know. Maybe the biggest departure (surely the biggest risk) was deciding not to include any poems from my chapbooks. I hope that gives readers a sense of culmination, if not change as such. In those senses, yes, maybe I've started with as clean a slate as possible. In many ways I feel a need to take stock, even start again.

Tell us a little about the writing of the book - first collections are often a "Best Of so far", but this feels much more coherent. How much of it was written with the collection in mind, rather than as occasional poems slowly accumulated into a book?

For a long time now I've known that I'm interested in 'concept albums'. I like to read a book with a sense that all the poems in it add up to a larger conceptual whole, that the poet is trying to tell me something. I don't think this approach is particularly in vogue, and in a way, I get that: there's a danger that such books can repeat themselves, or feel ham-fisted in terms of how much they're trying to instruct readers and point them to that 'Aha! I get it' realisation of what the book's about. I hope readers don't feel cheaply manipulated by my writing. At the same time, though, I'm unsatisfied with books that feel like a 'best of my stuff so far', with no organisational principle other than 'Which were my best poems?' This might be to do with how my Hydrocephalus-addled brain works, but how do I prioritise a criteria for 'Best' if I'm aware of so many possible ones? So many poets seem to come forward with 'objective criteria' for pinning down 'Best', I really had to find an emotional or conceptual onus with which to pick one way over another, or I was lost. So my way was to discard questions like 'Which are my best poems?', and to think 'What have I been trying to say all this time?' I wanted readers, if possible, to be able to say I remember that book because it was about... which was pertinent to my life at that moment. All of my favourite books have stuck in my craw for that reason.

As far as how this was put together, there are poems (particularly the Leopard Gecko sequence now called 'fragments from The First Week of the World: the herpetological bible') which date back to early versions written something like five or six years ago, possibly more. I'm not sure, I don't date my drafts. I'm fairly prolific, and a lot of these poems were started before, or written in parallel to, The Snowboy and Lever Arch. But those each seemed very self-contained to me, and even when I first felt the spark of the idea, Species took all that time to become a potentially-coherent piece. For a start, I had to come to realise that all of the elegies to dead pets I'd been writing (which I'd considered totally geeky indulgences) had to be something that other people might want to read. I also had to realise they symbolised quite a significant thread in my work as a whole: this central motif of 'natural' and 'unnatural', 'domestic' and 'captive', 'familiar' and 'queer/alienating', 'heaven' and 'hell', 'life' and 'death', that sort of thing. Some of the later poems I wrote, which are perhaps more explicitly about human experience, were written as I was realising that I might be able to throw nature, queer and disability poetries together as kind of a trilogy of concerns that talked to each other about 'otherness.' I was trying this in the past. I hope it's more fully-realised here.

Ultimately, I guess I don't care much for poetry in a vacuum. If it doesn't draw strands together from our lives lived in a particular society (and in terms of the UK at the moment, a society being heavily engineered and conditioned to be anti-disability and anti-welfare), if it doesn't seek in some way to give to or interact with that society, I'm not amazingly drawn to it. With a few exceptions, 'poetry for its own sake' seems like a non-entity to me. There's a sense of urgency, a need to want it to matter, especially now.

Do you use other poets, workshops, forums, etc. as sounding boards during the writing process, and if so, who?

I used the online forum PFFA (the Poetry Free-For-All) for some years before I was first published in Magma in 2010. A few forum members will recognise the lizard poems in Species, early drafts of which I very tentatively workshopped there. Eventually I felt that although I had met some great contacts and supports through online workshopping, I had to go it alone. I had to more closely guard my work in order to make it something readable before showing it off in public (I was a serial poster, a habit which hasn't changed in social media circles), especially since my approach to disability had to reflect my own living with it; there can be so many expectations built in the minds of able-bodied critics about how the disabled experience should be presented and written about to a 'wider readership' (which I came to realise would not, in most people's minds, include me). For a long time I felt the frustration of that without knowing how to articulate it, or (more importantly) find a solution to it.

I was published in Magma after I got frustrated with workshopping, sent some poems out on a whim, hardly expecting to get them accepted. But that's what happened. Since then, I've met some incredibly supportive writers who have truly grasped, I think, what I was trying to achieve in my work, and helped me find and hone my various voices and techniques. I'm guaranteed to forget someone so I don't like lists, but I feel particularly indebted to Ira Lightman and Andrew Philip. We've often passed poems back and forth to one another on Facebook (a social network site I love and hate in equal measure!). Since co-editing Catechism: Poems for Pussy Riot in 2012, Sophie Mayer and Sarah Crewe have been incredible influences to me in terms of thinking about my subjects and concerns, my various political, social and bodily identities, and how to channel those into poems through an intersectional lens, queer and feminist poetries, body-positivity. These all converse with disability in some great ways, and I'm trying to move forward into a more intersectional practice. I feel like, if my poetry doesn't draw together all the separate strands of embodiment and oppression in my lived experience, it doesn't cut it anymore. Maybe even the lizards (I keep lizards as a hobby, it's an obsession) speak to that.

Daniel Sluman, whose Nine Arches debut collection Absence Has a Weight of its Own deals with his experience as an amputee after having had cancer as a child, has been a great ally in terms of thinking about disability/crip poetics, the ways we might be more involved in it, even try to shed more light on it in the UK, if we can. I got to know Daniel better over the time I was co-editing Fit to Work: Poets Against Atos with he and Sophie Mayer. We agree on a lot of things regarding disability, and even when we disagree, I always come away from our arguments with a deeper, more nuanced perspective.

One of your main concerns seems to be the poet's urge (well, everybody's urge, really) to name and categorise neatly. My own feeling, increasingly, is that the very act of writing helps clarify for you how impossible, and often undesirable, this is. Would you agree?

Yes and no. I do think part of my task, personally, is to explore how, ultimately, labels are like birds: you'll be looking at them through your binoculars, and they'll fly away before you've got your camera out. And yet, we need them: poetry needs to always allow for continual exploration, interrogation and renewal of descriptors and their definitions while always insisting that we need to name. If there's any reason for language at all, it's to embody experience in a vessel, the word, so that we can take it from one place to another. Like an ark. Insisting that your 'names' be set-in-stone if you like (especially if you need them to be set-in-stone to be able to flourish in an ecosystem) this doesn't deny that evolution will happen. We need both the 'now' and the 'not yet'.

In doing disability activism with other disabled activists online, many of them intersectional feminists, I've become conscious of the difference(s) between labelling others as an oppressive act, and naming ourselves with 'self-identifiers', words and concepts that people who have lived non-normative experience have had to find and guard closely in order to both understand their experience, and articulate that experience to others. Without those self-identifiers, we could never campaign for our rights. We could never demand our equality unless we could first familiarise people with our chosen labels and what they represent for us. 'Labels' and 'self-identifiers' are too often confused. In my experience, non-disabled people particularly are so used to being told that labelling disabled people is bad, negative, harmful (we are all essentially human beings!), they will often have a knee-jerk impulse to neutralise and remove your self-identifiers, even if you've explained why you need them: they perform the function of making you visible in a world which would rather erase you. It's easier to get along with you if it doesn't require me to understand you. But we can't rush to wipe that slate clean between us. 

In Species, animal taxonomy, and the religious 'taxonomy' of social groups (finding its most gruesome manifestation in Social Darwinism, eugenics, the execution alongside the Jews of the deformed, and the economically unproductive 'workshy' during the Holocaust), seemed like a way of handling all these concerns. Our neatest human categorisations tend to result in the strictest, most trapping prejudices and stereotypes. The book begins with an epigraph about the alleged division of the Mosaic Law into three 'species': moral, civil and ceremonial. In part, it's that arbitrary separation of the Levitical prohibitions into 'categories' by Christian theologians which has allowed continual discrimination against LGBTQI people to survive even in spite of other arguments. Evangelicalism, particularly, is hooked on a seemingly endless number of binaries: 'gay' / 'straight', 'male' / 'female', 'sick' / 'healed', 'heaven' / 'earth', 'sinfulness' / 'righteousness,' you name it. Many discourses (queer, feminist, crip, chronic illness and more) are trying to demolish these binaries and replace them with spectrums. Of course, the 'spectrum' itself can be problematic. No disability experience can be said to fall neatly onto a horizontal line; there are too many variables and offshoots. I'm reminded of the movie Donnie Darko, when Donnie (Jake Gylenhaal) gets angry at his teacher for making him place different human experiences onto a horizontal line beginning at FEAR and ending in LOVE. Given a choice between the two, I would rather the 'spectrum' than the 'binary,' but is that not another binary?

What I do think is that while so many self-definitions must be written down so that they are able to be shared and explored in safe communities, they also need to be open to constant upgrades by, and within, those communities. I'm repeating myself, but words are never just words, they're vessels: for stories, histories and experiences.

I'd extend that to poets themselves. The various schools and categories that they get lumped into seem increasingly irrelevant, and in the best possible way your poetry feels like an example of that, drawing on very disparate influences and inspirations. Is that fair?

Yes I think so. One of my very earliest poet-obsessions was William Blake: painter, illustrator, poet, nursery-rhymer, alleged madman, utopic visionary, punk, social justice warrior, anti-poverty activist, theologian, occultist, esoteric spiritualist! You name it. If poetry could be so apparently contradictory, I used to think, and bring together so many aspects, I wanted to do that. I think life is probably always a set of contradictions to some extent, but art so often tries to iron them out and neutralise them. On what basis, I don't know.

As I got deeper into learning poetry I felt a pressure to adhere to specific schools, nations, techniques and aesthetics, modernism/post-modernism (binary alert). An anxiety of influence, maybe. Seemingly everyone wants you to sign on a dotted line of some sort. Poets can champion their own directions as 'the right way forward', devaluing and pushing down others in the process. I have my opinions about what's 'greater' and 'lesser' regarding my practise, but it's all about what I want to say and explore, and how I can do it best at different times, in different contexts. Various poets from various traditions and schools, and none, have assisted me in figuring that out, and I still keep finding them. What makes that approach hopefully more coherent than it sounds is that I try hard to stay conscious of what I want to say. 

The poetries that stick, as it were, are the ones I carry with me for any length of time. Early on it was the Romantics (mostly Blake, easily my favourite Romantic), Confessional poets (particularly Plath and Sexton), 'religious' poets (Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Metaphysicals, especially John Donne, and contemporary poets like Gillian Allnutt), the apocalyptic (Dylan Thomas), landscape and nature (Heaney and Hughes). In the last few years it's been more political activist poetries, Eastern European poetry (I love several Polish poets), poetries of social exile and disenfranchisement through non-normativity. Surrealism, conceptualism and visual poetries, Disability / crip and Survivor Poetics, queer and feminist poetries, poetries of colour and race (particularly activist-poets like Audre Lourde, who so amazingly drew together black, queer and feminist threads). Basically, you name it, I'll tell you if I want it.

I particularly enjoyed the Abnominations section - could you tell us a bit more about this form (Abnominals) and how you came to write them?

Abnominals are a fantastic form invented by Scottish poet Andrew Philip. When he introduced me to the form I went away and wrote loads of them. Andrew describes the abnominal in his second collection The North End of the Possible: 'The abnominal is a form I have developed using only the letters of the dedicatee's name, each of which must appear at least once per stanza. The poem, which is 20 lines long, should begin and end by addressing the dedicatee in some way. The title must also be an anagram of their name.' 

The abnominal allowed me to directly address various personalities who felt like representatives of the themes throughout the book, including David Cameron, David Attenborough, Maurice Sendak (Where The Wild Things Are). There are one or two more personal abnominals, one addressed to my wife Sarah, another to our miscarried child, named Evie-Lyn, who was only ever born in our imaginations. It seemed like I couldn't explore 'otherness' across a book without looking at death as another kind of existence, the possibility of a next life, and what happens when we have to imagine a life that never literally was as we would have liked. Maybe anthropomorphising animals, exploring animal gender, is similar to imagining a child you never met, or even the self you would like to become. I don't know.

I also loved the abnominal's imposed constraints. It's easy to be drawn to a default clarity of line and syntax time and time again. The abnominal forced me to be more inventive with how everything was expressed. They frequently devolve into a kind of non-sense which can send the brain off in all sorts of associative directions, but which can also encompass characters just through sheer sound and vocabulary play. The abnominal stretched me: If I couldn't use a word because it had the letter 'L' in it (a real problem letter for me; it kept popping up where it didn't belong), I had to find a 'legal' word, or write the whole line again. It kept me on my toes, so to speak. I'm very grateful to Andrew for not only approving my use of the form, but reading, enjoying and encouraging me to include the number of abnominals I did.

And the inevitable closing question - what next? Do you have other projects in the pipeline?

 I have a novel, which has fairly recently become a verse novel, that I've drafted I don't know how many times over the last nearly-a-decade. I want to finish that, but it needs more... something (one or two secondary characters need more colour and purpose in the plot, an end game, that sort of thing). So I'm going to go back to it. You might see it one day. I have a few new poems in early stages, and possibly a concept, or set of concepts, for another collection. For now I'm going to just sit back and enjoy what feels like an 'end game' for me of sorts, at least to the first act. I've written the book I wanted to write. What I do next is anyone's guess. I'm excited by that. Maybe I need a hiatus so that I'm still around but the pressure's off.

New, from Nine Arches Press

Mark Burnhope's debut full collection, Species, is out this week from Nine Arches Press, and having enjoyed an advance copy, it's a very fine follow-up to his chapbooks, The Snowboy and Lever Arch. I'll be talking to Mark about it, disability issues, poetry and writing on Polyolbion from Monday morning - make sure you don't miss it.

A poetry blog tour

The excellent Roy Marshall invited me to take part in this tour of poetry blogs. How does it work? Well, I answer four standard questions about my own work, then link to the blogs of three more poets, who will answer the same questions over the next few weeks.

Now, you'll notice that there are just two links posted so far - to Gill McEvoy and Tim Love. That's because most of the poets I know had already been approached. If you'd like to take part, then, drop me a line, and I'll add your link. Anyway, here goes...

What am I working on?
I've been working with a photographer, Phil Harris, on a project looking at landscape and particularly the landscape of John Clare's poetry, although it's started to take us down some quite different routes, too. It's been a really exciting and challenging way of working - neither of us wants to end up effectively illustrating each other's work, so we've just been figuring stuff out as we go along.

I've also got a long-standing sequence that I've been working on, and that I'm thinking of polishing up and sending out to pamphlet publishers some time this year.

Alongside both of those I've been writing some very occasional occasional poems, but it's pretty slow going (for reasons that will become clear later in this post).

Finally, I'm planning a prose project - if it gets approved, it would certainly feed into my poetry, I think, so I'm looking forward to working on it.

How does my work differ from others in the genre?
Hmmm. Difficult, and probably not really for me to say. I'm always slightly conscious that, not having done an English or Creative Writing degree, my reading of poetry has been a bit haphazard (although voracious), so maybe that shows up in my own work, but I'm not sure. I do tend to write a lot of nature poems, too, and for the most part I tend to dislike enlisting birds or animals or whatever for obvious symbolic or metaphorical effect, but having said that my latest book, The Elephant Tests, contains several very obviously symbolic elephants (I know next to nothing about the actual animals).

Why do I write what I write?
Well, I suppose I'd say because I have to, although that can end up sounding a bit pretentious. I do get physically uneasy when I have something I want to write but work or whatever else is getting in the way.

As regards subject matter it does tend, for the most part, to be rooted in the subject areas I know most about, although I'd also say that by doing so I find out more about them. I'm interested in the potential of all the arts to change attitudes about environmental issues (this is something that New Networks for Nature has pioneered), so that has been increasingly important in driving my work, I think, but it is very much about the poetry first and foremost - I don't like the idea of browbeating readers at all.

How does your writing process work?
It's changed quite a bit over the years, and continues to change. I make notes for poems all the time, and although I like a Moleskine as much as the next person, I scribble on any scrap of paper to hand. More and more I also make notes on my phone or iPad. More and more, too, I remind myself to write something, anything, including blog posts, diary entries, etc., rather than waiting around for inspiration. I mine a lot of my other writing for poetry 'prompts' and ideas.

Having done that, I usually write the first full draft by hand, then later put it on my PC. I've been trying to take far longer over revising poems, giving myself a set period to let them 'mature', so I'll then go back to a piece a few times over several months. I generally have quite a few poems on the go at once, so I don't worry too much if one gets abandoned for a lengthy period - last week, I went back to a piece that had sat untouched for four years, and reworked and 'finished' it within 10 minutes. I think the time away just made its flaws so obvious, as well as the potential solutions.

In physical terms, while I make notes all the time, I tend to do all the hard work in the evenings and at night. I'm not sure why, but I struggle to write poetry much before 6pm. I can't listen to music while I write, and I stay away from Twitter and Facebook, but I sometimes quite like having something undemanding on the TV or radio, such as cricket or snooker, that I can dip in and out of.

The blogging tour continues...
For more answers to these questions, see:
Gill McEvoy, http://redbotinki.blogspot.co.uk/
Tim Love, http://litrefs.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/a-poetry-blog-tour.html

An interview with Gill McEvoy, part 2

Chester poet Gill McEvoy has published two (now sold out) pamphlets with HappenStance, Uncertain Days and A Sampler, and two full collections, The Plucking Shed (2010) and Rise (2013), both from Cinnamon. This is the second part of my interview with her, plus a selection of poems from the new collection – the first part of the interview can be found here.

I like that idea of a sort of ongoing sequence, with Nuala popping up again and again in the future. Which brings me on to the subject of future work – do you do any planning of what you're going to write, or tend to let the poems 'come to you', and wait until they start to coalesce around a certain theme?

My first two collections were formed from poems that accumulated but that seemed to belong together. In general I let poems come to me, which so far they've been very generous about doing! 

But for a long time now I've had a particular sequence of poems in mind, loosely based on one of the Greek myths. It will be a pamphlet rather than a large collection and it has taken a lot of thought, many drafts, and was the major project I worked on at Hawthornden, although I did use that time also to tidy up the poems in the forthcoming Rise.

For this sequence I have read and re-read every version of the myth I can lay hands on (there are always so many versions of Greek myths, tiny little changes in the story can be worth seizing on), and I've tried it in close parallel to the myth and then, finding that didn't work, tried to ignore the myth altogether and just write the poems that tell the story as it is today.

One thing I would like to do, even if I have to do it at my own expense as a limited small booklet and find someone to illustrate it, is to assemble all the poems I've written about horses, another great love of my life. A handful appeared in The Plucking Shed and one in Rise but there are a good many more.

I have been looking at the kind of books book-binders and textile artists can create – saw some marvellous examples in the Scottish Poetry Library, and more at Ledbury Poetry Festival, also recently in a local exhibition which was a collaboration between poets and textile artists at Frodsham. I would love to produce something along those kind of lines, but my own handwriting is so appalling even I cannot read it. All I could do is create the poems!

I’m also collaborating with a friend, Polly Bolton, a singer and choir leader, to produce a sung/read show based on the lives of three Shropshire women. It is to be called Out of the Land, and the stories cover Molly Morgan who was bigamously married, transported to Australia twice, and thanks to the use of her charm and wit became a wealthy woman. The second is Katherine Moore, whose four children were taken from her and sent off to America on the Mayflower; only one survived. The third is Sarah Burton, whose home cottage was outside any parish boundaries so she was able to conduct a business as a midwife to unmarried mothers. Polly is setting the poems I've created to music, and some of her choir members will join us in the eventual production, which we hope will be spring 2014. It's been very exciting doing this and has involved a good bit of touring round Shropshire to see where the women came from and also researching laws of the time and anything we can find about their lives or life at the time, the 16th and 18th centuries.

So, a pamphlet needing much thought, a sung-and-read show needing a lot of work, and a would-be booklet of horse poems - I must have reached the age of Reason, not Intuition! But I am enjoying it very much.

Can I ask the old question about influences? Who are your main influences?

Influences? Oh Lord, such a hard question! I read very widely, buy more poetry books than I can afford, and love the work of so many poets, but if I must narrow it down, then I relish the sensuous, tactile richness of Keats as shown in Ode to Autumn and St Agnes' Eve, and some of the poetry of Alfred Noyes which enthralled me as a child, especially the rhythmic repetition of lines as in Sherwood, what I call 'chantery'! I discovered with joy the simple directness of Machado, Frost, and Edward Thomas. I also hold dear the mysticism of San Juan de la Cruz, and Kathleen Raine's ability to find the numinous in the humble, remarkably so in her poem Scala Coeli.

When I was ill I clung to Louis MacNeice's poem Snow as if it were a life-raft; indeed I had an article published in Poetry News on how much the poem had truly helped me, and that article led to a short series of poets writing about their own 'poems of significance'. I still greatly enjoy MacNeice's work. His poem Mayfly is a delight where he speaks of the mayflies going 'up and down in the lift' all day just for fun!

Later I came to admire the work of Denise Levertov, Jane Kenyon, Lorca, Luis Cernuda,  Eavan Boland, and Derek Mahon (the latter is very unlikely to remember it but we both worked at the Language Centre of Ireland, Dublin, for some months). At the moment I am re-reading the poetry of Sylvia Plath and feeling astonished yet again at her sheer power of language and expression.

But if you were to tell me I could keep only one poem to sustain me through life I would choose Denise Levertov's The Unknown. It perfectly describes our restless human longing for that vague 'something else':

"One doesn't want rest, one wants miracles". And when they don't happen

"Beaten you fall asleep... wake to witness...eager furniture, differentiated planes....the windows big and solemn, full of the afterglow...

The awakening is to transformation

word after word."

Isn't that what every poet seeks?

I'd like to repeat exactly what Roy Marshall asked me recently, because it's a fascinating question – one of the strengths of your poems is that they can read and appreciated or enjoyed by a ‘non-poetry’ reading audience. I’d like to relate this to something Don Paterson said in an interview last year, that poetry has a ‘moral obligation to clarity.’ I wondered what, if anything, this phrase might mean to you, and if the concept of clarity is important in your work?

Oh, without doubt my answer would be YES! Clarity is vital if you want a reading public, especially among those who are not themselves poets or dedicated readers of poetry. I'll underline my answer with this anecdote: at an open-mike I read my poem Message to the Well-meaning (from my previous book The Plucking Shed). Afterwards a man came up to me and said "Yes! That poem - it's exactly like that" and I felt so thrilled, the kind of response that's worth more than anything.

I strongly feel it behoves poets to remember they are writing for others; we're human-beings writing to bring alive the world and our experiences for other human-beings, to touch that chord of Yes! in others' hearts. And sometimes we succeed. I'm not a very public poet but I am lucky enough to have a small public of loyal readers who like my work. And that is joyous. If we lose sight of our readers we'll end up in an introspective world of poets reading to poets, which I suspect is a bit like where we are now, and probably why there's a slump in poetry-book buying. We have a duty (and the gift) to "awake" others to "transformation word after word", as in the Denise Levertov poem I quoted earlier in this interview.

Clarity is for me one of the hallmarks of a great poet like George MacKay Brown - through simple recurring images of daffodils, fish, salt, boats, storms, whisky, bread, corn, stars, and evidence of simple belief in the Christian calendar, he takes you with him through the seasons of the Orkney year. Marvellous work. There is a line in his poem Creator which says "He is the Seed locked in the House of Dust". That seed could easily be poetry; the poet's task is to set it free, make it grow.

Lastly, the enduring popularity of a radio programme like Poetry Please says it all. People want to hear tried, tested, and loved poems. Loved is the significant word. Poetry is about the heart, whatever its subject.

Simplicity. Honesty. Clarity.

Wonderful words. Wonderful.

Exorcising the chemotherapy wig

I buried it deep below

my cotton pants and nylon bras.

Wispy hair caressed the gussets, hooks.

In the basket on the wardrobe

it raised the hackles of its fur.

On still nights I would wake

and hear it purr.

In the solid wooden box

it's feelers palped the edges,

picking up my pulse.

In the grate I set a match to it,

watched it jerk and leap,

throw out angry sparks

until it stilled to ash.

Pig

Over her thirteen years of life

prolific litters squirmed against

her vast complacent sides.

He'd lean on the wall of her sty

for hours,

bring her offerings of cabbages,

corn stalks,

the incense, myrrh and gold

of beech nuts, acorns.

Shrouded in muslin,

glistening with salt,

her earthly self was turned to flanks

of bacon, ham.

At mealtimes he'd hold her flavour

on his tongue,

stretch out a hand,

as if to scratch once more her bristly back.

  

The Christmas helter-skelter

She thinks it's a lost lighthouse

Lifted from a coastal rock.

Red and white candy rock,

dropped in the city's square.

Its boards are bare,

no-one's riding it,

no music celebrates

it's strange appearance here.

She puts her small hand,

gloved in knitted snowmen,

into her mother's hand

and shakes her head.

Take it away, she says.

It makes her sad, as if she

should hug the lonely thing,

but how would her arms

reach round it?

Take it away, she says again,

meaning Take me home, Mummy,

take me home.