1. My pamphlet is out and purchase-able!  Early!  I’m a Salt Modern Voice!

2. My wade through Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism has been lightened by some droll former reader of the copy I borrowed from UEA’s library.  Dear Northrop writes:

We may call this kind of associative process poetic etymology, and we shall say more about it later. (Princeton University Press, 1957, p.277)

To which the reader has responded:

I can hardly wait.

Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde c. 1380, lines 1786 – 1792.

But why am I thinking of Chaucer and his epic poem?  Because I have a little book out myself!  LOOK!

It really is a little book – a pamphlet, 24 poems, some of them over several pages – and I’m so pleased with the excellent job that Salt have done.  I’ve said this before, but I find the pamphlet format very satisfying; the size allows for a tightly-controlled sequencing, where you’re able to create a clear trajectory of thought, or narrative arc or just a very strongly pointed-up series of connections between poems.

Not that I’m against publishing in a longer format.  I’d love the chance to do that too.  But in these straitened times, with the poetry presses’ lists getting fuller and fuller, those opportunities are a bit more squeezed.  And while waiting for one of those opportunities, why not make use of the pamphlet?  Or maybe, the pamphlet is the way forward in poetry publishing, and longer, single author volumes will be no longer viable?  Scary but exciting thought…

Mine is perhaps a more conventional use of the format – genuinely, a little book – but artists and writers throughout history have made very creative and original uses of the pamphlet that challenge how we think about reading, books-as-objects…  One excellent starting point for investigating this would be UCL’s Little Magazines, Alternative Press & Poetry Store Collections .  Another would be the British Library – who host the Michael Marks Pamphlet Awards and have, as you’d expect, an extensive collection of independent and small press publications.

But I digress.  The Bridle will be out at the end of November.

* Something I’ve always wondered: In ‘Trompe le Monde’, Black Francis sings: “Go, little record go….”  Do you think he’s quoting Chaucer?  Another reason why they’re my favourite band.

Joan Hewitt lives in Tynemouth with her German partner. In 2003, she won the Northern Promise Poetry Award from New Writing North, and was awarded a Distinction in Newcastle University’s MA in Writing Poetry in 2004. 

 Her poems have appeared in various journals including London Magazine and Southlight, and have been widely anthologised, notably in The Body and the Book: Writings on Poetry and Sexuality (Rodopi Press: Amsterdam and  New York), 100 Island poems of Great Britain and Ireland (Iron Press) and Not a Muse world anthology (2009:Haven Press: Hong Kong). In addition, she has been placed in five international competitions, including the Ledbury

She loves giving readings. Past venues include Theatre Royal (with the Royal Shakespeare company); the Literary and Philosophical Society; the Blue Room,   Newcastle, with French novelist Sylvie Germain; the Baltic; and  Costa poetry café in Liverpool, City of culture event , 2008. 

Joan is a member of the Northern Poetry workshop, poems from which will appear in In Your Own Time. (Shoestring, 2012, ed G.Wardle), foreword by Chair Sean O’Brien.

How did you come to start writing creatively?  What place does writing have in your life now?

Poems always came when something punched a hole through the daily fabric of life, something needing to be mended or recorded or dealt with: very much Heaney’s idea of poetry as “redress.” That hasn’t changed, although reading a poem by someone else and,much less  frequently, a workshop stimulus can be the start.

I recently found a quote in my 2010 journal which I didn’t reference.Perhaps a reader can help.  ” We forget the amazing things that happen to us.Poetry remembers them.Also what is given shared articulation can never hurt so much as what remains unuttered.”  In  creating  a poem, I give the difficult-to-express a form and solidity which satisfies more and seems more enduring than the journal scribblings which fill four shelves in our house. Through a poem I often find out what I didn’t know.

As a 6th form convent schoolgirl in Liverpool in the 60s and a very unsophisticated Leeds university student, on an English  course with no modern poetry, my few poems  were usually some variant on  unfulfilled  love or desire.  I had no  habit of writing: the impulse came, was satisfied, and went. At 15 I did a very romantic variation on Eliot’s “Prufrock”‘,  fuelled by a crush on a friend’s older brother. At 17, Sylvia Plath blew open a hole in the wall of the male  canon , and I sat up all night with “Colossus.” Suddenly poetry seemed more than something that I just read and quoted-often as a riposte to my father,  who worked on the docks, but could use apposite chunks of  Shakespeare or Burns on any occasion.

I never thought of publishing, knew nothing of small magazines,  and had no connection with any young poets at university.Geoffrey  Hill was my tutor: I found him terrifying. There was no way I would show him my first and only Surrealist poem ” Comfort me with savage apples”.I must have shown to a flatmate, because  I found  the line carved in dirty  snow outside the Union one night, and felt a thrill that it was “out there.”  Somehow  I knew enough to  defend myself against the guy who came up in the library and said triumphantly, “I know where you stole that from!  The Song of Songs!”  I  pointed out with dignity  that, by inserting the word “savage” and expanding on the concept, I had produced a valid “version”.

In the late 60s and early 70s, I burnt the candle at both ends, as a teacher and ingenue  in hippy London; followed by teaching in Finland and former Yugoslavia.I  returned to the UK, married and had 3 daughters.  The few poems which I made time to write, at times of elation or change or difficulty,  remained in drawers . I had picked up a pen the night my first daughter was born to celebrate her perfection, but she woke, and that became the pattern.  It was 9 years before the next poem.

I had returned to EFL teaching part- time, and was visiting an old Azerbaijini poet, a refugee. I told him that I had a poem in me ( a need to mourn something ) but no time to write it. He made me see how crippling that was; that I had to respect my need. On the twenty- minute metro journey home, I wrote it.

I attended Jon Silkin’s WEA class and he was complimentary. The poet Andrea Capes submitted my name to the Northern Poetry Workshop, an invited group chaired by Sean O’ Brien, who was Northern Fellow at the time, and I was accepted. This was a breakthrough: I started to see poetry as essential to me and as something to be worked at and honed. The quality of the others’ output and the rigour and objectivity of the criticism was extremely daunting. I wrote down everything they said and  remembered only the negatives. Then it clicked: in the workshop, the poem was the point, not its inception (my father dying, my divorce , etc),and I grew to appreciate the superb attention paid to the workings and effect of the poem by this range of practitioners. From Sean, Bill Herbert, and Peter Armstrong,  I learnt that the way a poem sounds is as important as the way it looks on the page.  I gained confidence and  toughened up under criticism, no longer taking it as a blow to self-esteem.  I still relish the willingness to help with unresolved issues of a poem . I learnt from poets older and younger than me: Alistair Elliot at one end, Jake Polley at the other. Jake ,almost thirty years younger, was for a time my poetry “uncle”, giving the sureness of advice that only a very talented poet can offer. The gender mix in the group has been  useful:  Kathy Towers and Helen Farish have warmed me with their painstaking attention to detail, their wanting my poem to achieve its potential. This contradicts the notion that women feel that, with arguably fewer opportunities for prestige publication, they cannot afford to help each other.

Describe the day job and how it fits in around the writing.

Teaching English as a Foreign Language, with its emphasis on grammar and basic communication, including a summer school, and  ongoing university  management and contractual problems , was  crushingly antipathetic towards poetry. I recently retired, and I wake every day, still early,  with a sense of  freedom.  More time to read as well as  write: I have  two  walls of  poetry, a  window to gaze through , and not a student  or essay in sight.

How did Cinnamon Press come to publish your collection?

In an attempt to be my own person when my marriage broke up, I sent off the first poem ever to London Magazine.Alan Ross accepted it, and then two more, and then asked me for a book. This was, with hindsight, the worst thing to have happened, as I felt I didn’t need to send out to smaller  magazines.This promise ,and being placed in competitions, kept me going. Hubris! Sadly, Alan  Ross, obviously a man of impeccable taste, died. One night at work, at the age of 59, before the onerous semester’s teaching began, I stuffed sets of twelve poems into envelopes and  sent out to  ten publishers( not an ethical move). CInnamon replied within two weeks and offered me a contract to publish within six months.I took it. I  got two more expressions of interest,  with cautions that I would have to wait until ACE grants were secured.I never regretted sticking with Cinnamon, as Jan Fortune-Wood was an enthusiastic, excellent hands-on  editor, and organised a launch in Newcastle and a reading in  my home town of Liverpool.

I was struck by the importance of relationships in ‘Missing the Eclipse’.  Not just romantic or sexual relationships, but familial ones – as well as the relationship between, for want of a better word, poetic rivals and antecedents.  Is that something you were aware of when assembling the book?  How does relationship and communication as a theme feature in your work? 

It will be obvious from the above that I am an other-directed person.In a lecture on “The Poetry and the Personal” given in the university of Teeside, I was honest about the difficulty I had in including certain poems .  Vicki Bertram, in “Gendering Poetry ” cites  fear of offending family as one of the most frequent reasons for women publishing their first collections late.  Of course for the poet, the notion of the unutterable which has to be ultimately said has been discussed widely as a prime force of inspiration. But what about my  pre-divorce poems, for example? My husband was a decent , very private person. In the end, I included only one of those poems:”about” the negative effect of overwork on family life, “Commuter  Moon”; perhaps because I had realised that the poem was as much about me as about him, and therefore would be relevant to others. The title poem “Missing the Eclipse” about the post-divorce time with a new partner,  came out of  a row with a daughter. I very tentatively asked her permission to use it and she very generously gave it. However, I have since heard that one if  her sisters  disliked her own appearance in it.Naturally I regret that.But many poet (Hughes, Heaney, VIcki Feaver, Colette Bryce, inter.al) have come to  the conclusion that it’s the tension between the unutterable and the uttered which drives the poem. For me, a  poem  is often the answer to an unframed question.

A woman in the audience asked me why I wrote about others so much. I replied that  I am what  I am,  and people and relationships, with all their pleasures and tensions constitute my default landscape. That includes the poets I workshop with and read. Of course I like being alone and contemplative, but so far I have used that time to ruminate on the peopled times, and weave the natural world in, rather than it being the contemplative object per se.This may change as death approaches!

How did you gather and order the poems?  Was there an obvious sequence, for example, that leapt out at you?

 No, but that was such a pleasure discovering it,  on a very  long table! One factor was chronology, as the poems were spread over 14 years.I grouped the  parents and daughter poems, and the ones on my lovely partner, his parents, and friends were interspersed. I hoped I found a rhythm which allowed air in after the heavier poems. The last poem in the book was an important choice. I wanted to end on one which opened me up to future poems , so I chose” New in Vilnius”, one of those which I also enjoy reading aloud.Some of the earlier ones I find”clunky” to read: “Block”, for example, which used to be a performance piece.

I really enjoyed the variety of forms in the book, from very small pieces – that extend very little into the white space, both horizontally AND vertically – to the prose poems.  Could you discuss your use of form (and I guess I’m asking you about your line break and stanza break decisions)?  How do your poems take shape?

The first line usually comes first. If I can keep that with me and pay attention to its rhythm, I have a chance of a decent poem. I take it out for walks, and mutter. Sometimes those two lines are the only ones that stay with me for  a week or more. Whatever is going on in my life, I hold onto them.The longhand version finally becomes indecipherable and that is when I  transfer it to my PC and make further   decisions on line-endings, influenced by the space around the poem. The ear is the dominant consideration. I want to “score” it ( a term  learnt from a consummate performer of his own and others’ work, Bill Herbert) so that the reader knows how to read it aloud (as  I hope they do, at least sub-vocally). I may choose a form e.g.   a three line stanza of fifteen lines,  later lose a line, and then  re-do  as two-liners. I have even found that, faced with the new fourteen lines, I’ve played around with a sonnet.If the “turn” comes around line 8, then I end up with a more metaphysical or intellectual poem; meatier and denser.

What next?  Is your writing different?  Has it changed?  Are you assembling another book?  Are you working on any projects/residencies etc?

The inspirations for poems don’t come more often, but I now have more time to shape a poem. This currently seems to be reducing it,  as with a sauce that simmers.  Just spent two months returning frequently to  a forty  -liner and it’s now down to four lines.But it’s  better.

The ongoing estrangement from my daughters has been lately my poetic focus or obsession.I am using the poems as a way of  filling the space and silence between us; creating some kind of music.I have been fascinated by Derek Mahon’s  honest poems on what the break -up of his marriage meant to his  relationships with his children. What got me was the way he creates a music out of this guilt and pain.

“And I think of my daughter at work on her difficult art/And wish she were with me now between thrush and plover/ Wild thyme and sea-thrift , to lift the weight from my heart.”

More and more I wish I could write a song and sing it: it must be the Irish in me(25 per cent). Instead I’m using more half and full rhymes now, and  making poems which I can memorise .So the extra free time in retirement is taken up with crafting.

My latest “commission” is a very heavy one: a friend who is terminally  ill has asked me to write a poem for his funeral service.I have the first two lines and am finding it impossible to move beyond that. Because I don’t want to; because he’s a lovely man; because I feel inadequate.But I know I will, because it is a different kind of poetic imperative. At my age, I am writing more death poems for  friends and relatives , of course. I think it’s important. I notice the Irish poets do that more:acknowledging tradition.

Perhaps in eighteen months I will have enough for a new collection but it can’t be rushed.  I don’t want a regular teaching commitment but am open to workshop offers. I will be running one  in October on Elizabeth Bishop for Carlotta Miller Johnson in Morpeth, inspired by my visit to  Bishop’s grandparents’ village in Novia Scotia.

In April 2012,I will have five poems in the  anthology ” In Your OwnTime”, to mark the twentieth anniversary of Northern Poetry Workshop, edited by Gerry Wardle , foreword by Sean O’Brien and  published by Shoestring Press. You can imagine how exciting it is to be alongside thirteen others,  a diverse range of accomplished voices: including Sean, Paul Farley, Jake Polley, Colette Bryce, Bill Herbert, Peter Armstrong, Kathy Towers, Peter Bennet, Joan Johnson, Helen Farish, Alistair Elliot,  Michael McCarthy and Tony Williams.

Can’t wait.

Society’s happy enough for the young to covet fancy trainers when it profits, and for the young to feel ‘entitled’ as consumers. When the jobs, education, opportunities that might provide those fancy trainers disappear, society just says “tough shit”. What did we think would happen?

Much as I condemn the looters, I can’t help thinking this.

And another thing, I’m angry angry angry that all this trouble is a MASSIVE distraction from the issue we should be focussing on. What happened to Mark Duggan? His poor family and loved ones…so many of their questions still not answered, and after being treated with such disrespect by the police. HOW long were they kept waiting to meet a senior officer?

Still, at least it has persuaded mayor Johnson to return to London. Boris dear, it was never about whether or not the cops could cope without you (what did he think he was going to do? Join the ranks in full riot gear? Yeah, right.). It was about showing appropriate concern and support for your fellow citizens. And the fact that these pesky riots won’t go away as you’d hoped has finally brought you home…how tiresome for you, to have to stop pretending that everything will be fine.

*Edited in:  I should have added that Sophie Robinson (poet) first alerted me to the Martin Luther King statement.  And that she’s also found a Youtube video featuring  Nick Clegg last year,  ”predicting” riots if the Tories are elected.  I’d laugh if I weren’t so RAAAARRRRRRRRRR!

July also saw the Hairy Muse and I in Shetland.  We took a boat to the uninhabited island of Mousa, to see the broch.  Common seals and their pups reclined on the rocky shores on the other side.  We were bombed by great skuas and saw a tern harried by an arctic skua.  We squabbled over who would have custody of our pitifully small binoculars and back on the mainland, mooned around coastline, exclaiming at how beautiful it all was.  We went for walks around Lerwick, where we were staying, in order to see the grey seals that popped up out of the waters of Bressay Sound.  And of course, we visited a museum – and a lighthouse, where we saw puffins, shitloads of puffins, amongst other birds, and an improbably Heath-Robinson foghorn.  While there, I bought the Jen Hadfield  collection I don’t have  and spent the week  accompanied by  jolts of connection between her poems and my glimpses of the place I was in.  We ate scones and some of the best fish and chips I’ve ever had, and drank beer brewed on the islands.  We gawped at the enormous ocean liners that deposited their inmates at Lerwick for the afternoon, looking for all the world like space aliens in their designer sunglasses and raincapes and immaculate tennis shoes.  I narrowly avoided buying a CD of fiddle music.  The Hairy Muse took too many photos of shipwrecked navigational instruments.  We barely saw anything of Shetland, really – just enough to know that I want to visit again.

Haha, this last photo shows me high as a kite; such are the effects of heavy binocular-use.

Another event in July; the first reading I’ve given for quite a while took place at the Barbican Music Library.  So here I am at the launch of Issue 6 of the Long Poem Magazine.  Congratulations to the editors, and good luck to one of them, Anna Robinson, who is stepping down from her editorship in order to begin work on her PhD.  Doctor Robinson.  It has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?

Photo by David Andrews

I am trying to secure somewhere to live; that in itself is making my hair fall out.  At least it’s in the lovely town – sorry, city – of Norwich, which is a pleasure to walk around.

And I’m trying to do all the stuff my fantastic publisher needs me to do, in preparation for the pamphlet (if confused, refer to last post!).

And on top of that, I have my first Morley class.  Yes, the wonderful Morley College have employed me.  I’m teaching a Poetry Summer School Course (places still available!) for 3 weeks, starting this Thursday (21st).  And then I’ll be teaching the Beginner Poetry Class from September, while their regular teacher goes on sabbatical.  I’ve covered for her once or twice already, and thoroughly enjoyed it.  The atmosphere is very supportive, the students I met were very talented and lovely people.  If you fancy giving it a shot, do!  Or any of the other courses….I’m quite tempted by the London History ones, myself.

Anyway.  Another lovely thing, another busy thing.  I’m reading at the launch of Issue 6 of The Long Poem Magazine.  Here are the details:

Long Poem Magazine Launches Issue 6

Wednesday July 20th – 6.30 p.m.

Barbican Library

Barbican Centre, Silk Street,

for directions – follow the link below

http://www.barbican.org.uk/visitor-information/barbican-library

Readings from Mimi Khalvati, Mike Bannister, Chris McCabe, Graham Mort, Derrick Porter, Meryl Pugh, Steve Sawyer

Maybe I’ll see you there? 

And I haven’t even mentioned the Poetry Society’s EGM on Friday.  Partly because I can’t attend – juggling this little lot means I have to be at my day job on Friday.  But never fear, I have appointed my proxy etc. etc.  I haven’t really discussed the goings-on before.  I’m not sure I have an opinion, to be honest.  I was concerned to read of so many resignations.  I wanted to know about the circumstances surrounding those resignations.  And I want to be informed about (and hope to be reassured and excited by) plans for the Poetry Society’s future direction – and, as a member, to be consulted about that direction if the plans involve significant change.  That’s all.   Here’s wishing all involved a productive meeting.

But it happened.  I have the photos to prove it: our lovely Shetland holiday.  The Hairy Muse even managed to visit a Museum store and get his hands on the shipwrecked remains of some instruments.*  I’ll post some photos up at some point.

I came back to some very exciting news.  My second pamphlet is going to be published!  This year!  Salt have taken it on, and it’s scheduled for publication towards the end of this year.  They’ve done a wonderful job of it; look at that cover!  It’s part of the Salt Modern Voices series.  Another lovely thing; my friend Sophie Nicholls, who I first met on the Jerwood/Arvon Young Poet Apprenticeship back in the early 2000′s, is also having a pamphlet published as part of the series.  Scroll down the Modern Voices link above to see details.

*  The staff were wonderful, apparently.  Gave him scones and rhubarb jam, got things out of display cases for him and let him get his hands on one of the most rare bits of wood ever (something to do with it possibly being from an unusual navigational instrument).

How did you come to writing in the first place?

I came to poetry relatively late, at the tail-end of my twenties. Apart from some clumsy attempts at prose, and an album of songs for a small independent label, I’d written very little. Around about 2000 I took a small group of secondary school students on an Arvon Course at  Totleigh Barton, and David Morley, one of the tutors, was pretty encouraging of my faltering attempts to join in with the writing sessions. He suggested I submit for an Eric Gregory Award, which I did about a year later. Being callow in terms of writing poetry, I was very surprised to receive one, and at the reading it soon became apparent that the others were some way ahead of me in terms of developing their work. Jacob Polley, for example, was of the same Gregory vintage. But winning the award was a huge fillip: I plugged away for a few years, got some encouragement from a few poets I admired, Roddy Lumsden in particular, and slowly began to place poems here and there.

How do you balance it with your paid employment?
I’m Head of English at a large Grammar School, so I don’t write as much as I’d like to. But I do have weekends and holidays, so I manage. My partner’s a teacher and painter, and she’s very understanding of my need to use the holidays for writing (as much as I can) rather than for painting the kitchen, etc. I guess the administrative side of my job is less conducive to developing my work, but I do get to read a lot of poetry with my students, and at ‘A’ Level in particular that’s pretty stimulating. I try to introduce all my students to a lot of contemporary poetry, rather than always relying on the old chestnuts. We take a group of enthusiasts to the T S Eliot Prize readings each year, for example. And I teach a regular class for The Poetry School as well; so, I read a lot of contemporary poetry, and that, I think, is the best way to keep moving forward, especially in those phases when there are fewer chances to actually write.

What are the ideal circumstances in which to write a poem?

When I get an idea I scribble it down somewhere, anywhere. But if I want to work an idea into a poem, I just need a few hours with nothing else on the to-do list. A desk, a cup of coffee. That’ll do it.

How did you assemble the collection? How did you know, for example, when you had the makings of a full-length book?

I thought it was there a lot earlier than it really was. I sent an early version of the ms. to Faber, and they suggested I work on it for six months or so and re-submit. I took that as a huge endorsement (probably a larger endorsement than it actually was), but the ms. needed longer than six months. I can see that now.

The epigraph from Larkin’s ‘Dockery and Son’:

“ …a style
our lives bring with them: habit for a while,
suddenly they harden into all we’ve got”

provided a lens on the poems, in the sense that most of the characters in the book are navigating the world using engrained mental tics and routines that have hardened into something like character, a method by which to approach the world. Then, of course, there’s my own poetic style, or method, and the extent to which that’s either a source of creativity, or a kind of imprisonment. A limitation. There’s a thread there that, hopefully, holds the book together.

Thereafter, I was encouraged to give the sequencing a lot of consideration. So, I tried to place poems next to each other in such a way as to create echoes and arguments among the pieces. In doing that, I began to see that certain poems (even ones I’d grown rather attached to) needed to be excised entirely, and that others I’d put on the backburner might, with a little spit and polish, scrub up rather well.

By the time I came to submit to Salt, the book had been through a fair few revisions and formulations, and I was quietly confident it had settled into the shape it wanted to take. It took a few years, but the process taught me to be much more exacting in editing my own work. If you’re not completely happy with something, there’s really no point sending it out. Even when you are completely happy, it might be prudent to check again. And then again.

I was struck by the collection’s sense of history, and perhaps a specifically British history, as it has been and continues to be inscribed in man-made structures, on the landscape – as well as in the English language. Could you talk a bit about that? For example, why is time and the past a significant theme to you?

There are a few pieces with some basis in my own personal history. I guess that’s pretty common for a first collection. You mine your own past as best you can. The album sonnets are an obvious example, and there’s a sequence of pieces early in the first half that explore similar terrain. My hope for those pieces is twofold: firstly, that I’ve managed  to set the personal stuff in a context that resonates with other people’s experiences; and, second, that the poems are interesting enough in a formal and structural sense to read as well-made poetry. Otherwise, I might as well have kept a diary instead.

But, as you suggest, there’s a broader interest in English landscape, language and history. Aspects of folklore and language linger on in a culture, like fossils. The landscape itself, man-made or otherwise, is a set of fossils. I’m not invoking psycho-geography per se, but I am interested in the inscrutable relationship between landscape and the mind, how we read what’s about us – a particular stretch of river, a street, a park, a cemetery, the sound of waves, an overheard phrase – in a way that acknowledges both the objective history or quiddity of those things, but also the deeply personal and idiosyncratic meanings we ascribe to them as individuals.

The long poem ‘Bloomsday’, towards the back of the book, is very much about this. The persona walks down a road lined with Edwardian lampposts, gets on a bus, strolls though a park. That’s about it really. But the lampposts are fossils from another phase in the life of that street, with a set of class-based associations that mildly intimidate the speaker of the poem who lives on it. The park, too, is itself, with its own history, and whatever’s going on in it at that moment; but it’s also full of very personal memories. In the mind of a person moving through a landscape, all of these things are happening simultaneously – the civic and the personal, the historical and the present – forming and re- forming in curious agglomerations. I wouldn’t pretend that this is in any way novel, but I do hope that the specific way I’ve done it is interesting to a reader.

Now that the book is done and dusted, what strikes you about it? Are there things you notice about it, for example, that have only arisen since its publication and promotion? Or have you resolutely kept the covers shut?

The reviews it did get were very pleasing, especially as all the critics commented on the sequencing, and perceived coherence in the book and its themes. I was pleasantly surprised that people read it so attentively.

Having given it a few outings at readings, I’ve begun to identify which poems I most enjoy reading, which ones generally go down well whether I’m in Brighton, London, Bristol or elsewhere. And they aren’t always the ones I expected. Some people have said it’s a knotty book, quite difficult in places. I was surprised by that. But I guess everyone thinks their own work is transparently, abundantly clear when, perhaps, it isn’t.

But I’m still pleased with it. Still enjoy reading from it, or talking about it.

What will you do next? A rest? More poems? Prose?

Certainly not prose. I bore myself halfway through a sentence when I’m writing prose. And all that maneuvering of characters: you’ve planned an episode you think will be really interesting, when Calvin (or whatever the character’s called) gets his comeuppance at a funeral, but first you’ve got to put him on a bus to Dalston, so you end up writing pages about the view from the bus going up Kingsland Road, and before you know it he’s got into a fight with someone outside a kebab shop, for some reason that seemed to make sense at the time, and all the while new characters keep barging their way in, demanding a motive for their actions, a backstory. Even when, or if, you finally get Calvin to the funeral, the episode you planned has lost its allure. Seems unconvincing. At least, that’s my experience.

Poetry’s the thing. I’m working on a second ms. I’ve become obsessed with the figure of the Fool: in the Tarot, in literature, in folklore, in English history, as an archetype. A few of my fools have found their way into magazines now, and there’s a set of them in a forthcoming anthology called Smartarse (Knives, Forks and Spoons Press, 2011) but I’d love to get the whole lot out as a book-length celebration of foolishness.

…………………………………..

The Method Men  is available from Salt Publishing.  I recommend buying a copy – and if you don’t know the publishers, do peruse their website.  They’re NOT ‘regularly funded’ by the Arts Council and publish many beautiful and interesting things…

The poet I was backing (the fabulous Sophie Robinson) didn’t win, sadly, but I did love the work of the winner. I have his pamphlet with me now…

So, congratulations, James McGonigal!  Mariscat have done a lovely job.
And congratulations, The Crater Press!

Ok, maybe that was a bit of a weak and clunking link.  But still…. things are changing, something is shifting and the weather says back to me ‘Yes! Move! Go! Act!’

So I am, I will, I do.  I’ve accepted a studentship – 3 years’ funding for the PhD.  I’ve chucked in the day job.  I’m moving to a new city. 

The thunder rolls out above me, over the streets and the rec, the park and the pubs, the forest, the ponds, the motorway, out to the edges of the suburbs, and past them, to the fields, to the towns, the other cities….