Mark Antony Owen

is the author of digital-first poetry project Subruria. He’s also the creator, curator and driving force behind two popular and successful online poetry journals: the quarterly poet library that is iamb, and the ekphrastically focused After…

The Interview

1. How did you decide on what poems to send?

Alan asked us to take the gloves off – to write or select poems we felt our usual readers might not expect from us. Poems which perhaps we wouldn’t even consider publishing at all: not because we worry about the quality of those poems, but because we fear how they (and we) might be perceived upon publication. At least, that’s what I took away from Alan’s injunction. It made me choose a trio of poems that aren’t typical of me: poems which take a bigger risk. More specifically, for this first volume of wave two of The Whiskey Tree, my decision was settled once I remembered I had a poem that took a slant view of something quintessentially British: the weather. More exactly still, rain. This could have been a somewhat prosaic, unpromising topic for a poem intended to be ‘untamed’. What stopped it from being so was the fact that the rain which inspired the poem came laden with pinkish Saharan sand, owing to a freak weather event in southern England a few years ago.

2. What poetic form did it take, and why?

As ever, my three poems each took one of my nine self-created syllabic forms. I wasn’t prepared to go THAT left-field for this project!

3. How did you use the whiteness of the page in your poem?

All of my poems rest on invisible lilos in pools of white space. This is how I like to write my poetry. And if I’m being completely honest, it’s also how I like the poetry of others to be written.

4. How did you decide on the title of your poem?

It was about as literal as I could make it – which was deliberate for two reasons. The first is that I knew the title could be misread: a hurried reader perhaps thinking this was a piece about it raining IN the Sahara. The second reason was that I knew right away that every line beneath the title was going to have to work hard – obliquely yet lyrically – to leave the reader satisfied that the promise of the poem’s title has been fulfilled.

5. Imagery, or narrative. Which was more important to you in writing the poem?

Narratively speaking, I had a vague idea from the off that I was trying to tell the story of this peculiar weather event in a sort of linear way. But I rightly trusted my intuition as the poem unfolded. Its main driver became its lyricism: image begetting story the way character begets plot.

6. What do you think of where your poem is placed in the collection?

It’s near the beginning … so obviously, I’m thrilled! However sensitive we poets are, however understanding, we still have egos as swollen as whales! They need feeding – and something as simple as where our work appears in an anthology makes for a lovely appetiser.

7.  Once they have read your poem, what do you hope the reader will leave with?

I guess the answer to this is the same as the answer I’d give if you asked me this question about almost any of my poems: I want the reader to leave feeling differently. Thinking differently too, of course, but if I can implant a feeling as a result of something I’ve written, I can be fairly certain my work – in whole or in part – will have made a genuine impression. A lasting one too, I hope.

Weblinks:

bsky.app/profile/markantonyowen.com

bsky.app/profile/subruria.com

bsky.app/profile/iambapoet.com

bsky.app/profile/afterpoetry.com

subruria.com

iambapoet.com

afterpoetry.com