Wombwell Rainbow Book Interviews

Rory Waterman

his third full-length poetry collection, Sweet Nothings, is published by Carcanet , and is now available to order (click the book tit His second book of poems, Sarajevo Roses (Carcanet, 2017), was shortlisted for the Ledbury Forte Prize 2019. His debut, Tonight the Summer’s Over (Carcanet, 2013), is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Prize in 2014. He is also a critic, editor, and senior lecturer in English and Creative Writing.

The Interview

1. When and why did you start writing poetry?

When I was about 10, and at primary school. My school was on the edge of a small Lincolnshire village, and there were quite a few trees around. We had to go out in the playground one day, look at catkins and buds and suchlike, then come in and write a poem about our expedition. Mine was about how nice things are when you look at them properly, and how I hoped they’d stay like that, but we’d also been learning about pollution and the ozone layer, so that came into it as well. My really kind teacher encouraged me, bless her, so I kept trying again in my own time. My dad was a poet, so that probably helped too, in a way: I already knew it was something people might do. Then, when I was a ratty teenager, I wrote a lot more poems about being a ratty teenager, like everyone else, and got a few of them in print in decent enough magazines thanks to editors who probably should’ve known better.

I had a fairly complicated childhood, in some ways. My dad lived in Northern Ireland, and was a manipulative alcoholic, who was nonetheless my hero until I grew old enough to see why he shouldn’t be. I lived with my mum, aunt and grandmother in a little lodge house to an estate, a mile from the nearest village, until my grandmother died when I was 15, at which point we were booted out by the bastard landlord, my aunt upped sticks to her son’s house in Stafford, and my mum and I moved into a council house a few miles away. I then got expelled from school for taking some weed on a school trip, was let back in (probably, I suspect, because I was expected to do quite well; two other boys were excluded permanently, though they’d done the same thing as me), and failed almost all of my GCSEs. I tried to write poems about all of this, just to sort my spotty little head out, but they came out either as mawkish claptrap or as tenth-rate versions of Seamus Heaney, Louis MacNeice, Tony Harrison, John Agard or Philip Larkin, the only poets I really knew about at that age. It’s very frustrating to want to say something profound but to know you are too immature and unskilled to do it, so that put me off trying again until I’d grown up, and I certainly had a lot of growing up to do. The earliest poem I included in my first book, ‘A Suicide’, was written when I was 25.

2. Were you introduced to poetry by your dad?

Up to a point. I saw him about once a month, in England until I was 10 and then often in Ireland or for holidays, with a break of about 4 months at 14, when his last real partner left him and I felt disgusted by what I’d seen. He bought me some poetry books: the Heaney Selected on the bookshelf next to me says ‘To Rory, from Dad, October 1995’ on the flyleaf, which means he gave it to me when that four-month period ended. I was always more interested in finding my own way – I just found it in the same direction, in that instance.

3. What is the significance of the quotes at the beginning of each of the two sections of “Sweet Nothings?”

The book is in two halves, each of which has its own loose trajectory and set of concerns. I gave each section two epigraphs, contradictory in the first pairing and complementary in the second, all containing the word ‘nothing’. Explaining one’s poems, or the context in which one has put poems, feels a bit like explaining a joke, so I’m going to be careful about what I say. I didn’t want to give the sections names, because I thought that would be too limiting, so they’re just headed by Roman numerals. I think of the paired epigraphs as surrogates for titles, in a way: every poem in each section relates to both of the epigraphs preceding it, one way or another. And I think of a poem title as the first reading of a poem, in a sense, so I really felt I had to work to get them right – it took a ludicrous amount of time, and I’d been gathering potential quotations for three years before I finalised the manuscript. Had I not found the right four, I would’ve ditched the idea, and I felt it was equally important to read each of the ones I considered in the broadest context possible. I kept falling down huge rabbit warrens of reading for this, and suspected nobody would ever really notice them enough to ask, so I’m grateful you have asked. My favourite of the introductory quotations, at least in the context in which I put them, is the one from the Book of John (I’m not religious, at least not in a conventional sense): ‘Simon Peter saith unto them, I go a fishing. They say unto him, we also go with thee. They went forth, and entered into a ship immediately; and that night they caught nothing.’ The one that means the most to me is from Katherine Mansfield’s diaries: ‘But warm, eager, living life – to be rooted in life – to learn, to desire, to feel, to think, to act. This is what I want. And nothing less. That is what I must try for.’ I’m still trying, of course.

4, You delight in the use of “ordinary” words as in “Trigger Warning” and “University of Life”, almost using the words as triggers.

I’m not sure what you mean by ‘ordinary words’. Both of those poems are set in Lincolnshire, and both include tiny bits of local dialect, of a pretty mild variety, and of the sort that is normal in Lincolnshire (and elsewhere): ‘pack it in’, etc. The ‘University of Life’ sequence is really a trawl through doing various jobs one summer when I was a student, though like Wayne in Wayne’s World, I amassed a large collection of name-tags and hair-nets, over the course of about six years. Everything that happens in the sequence is true, though some names have been changed. It’s quite impolite, and it is probably for that reason that an academic acquaintance warned me, with the kind of jovial, hyperaware, hyperunaware cowardice only some contemporary academics can muster, that it might be perceived as a snobby poem. The pervy bloke who said ‘bleerk’ to mean bloke did indeed do so: he was from Manchester. Lincolnshire people don’t pronounce it like that, as you probably know. Every time we drove past a group of women he’d say something to us about tits. He did it without fail. Maybe he was a wonderful father and husband. The current narrative is that silence is complicity, and I certainly felt a bit of that then too in a less socially-mandated way, but I liked wearing my balls on the outside of my body so I kept my mouth shut instead. I think ‘University of Life’ makes it pretty clear I felt like a bit of an outsider talking about the waggon and my gaffer and stuff like that, though I biked up to the depot from our two-bedroom council house and certainly didn’t feel like I was a cut above. I wasn’t and I’m not. I’ve often enjoyed getting other voices into poems by quoting people, and both of these poems include some of that. It can help things to feel properly alert and animated. I’ve gone off piste, I realise, so I’ll get back to ‘ordinary words’. ‘University of Life’ is also peppered with allusions to literary works I studied on my degree (or, in one obvious instance, the dissertation focus of someone else), often wrenched ludicrously but I hope also appositely out of context. They’re all pretty well hidden apart from in the final section – designed to look just like ‘ordinary words’, if you like – and it doesn’t affect the poem much if you don’t notice them, though I like to think some people will spot at least a few.

5. How aware are and were you of the dominating presence of older poets traditional and contemporary?

I’m not the sort of person who only reads his contemporaries. Some poets do that and know little else about poetry, it seems. They can’t be very interested in poetry really, can they? They’re interested in being poets. The poets I return to most often are mainly long dead and belong to various traditions. I think I’m moderately ‘aware’, then, but I don’t feel any ‘dominating presence’ looming in from the past. I got called a ‘lefty Larkin’ once, which made me laugh and wince. I don’t mind admitting his poetry had a big influence on me (and that I’m ‘lefty’, albeit of a non-censorious, real world kind wary of aspects of the current corporate-sponsored orthodoxy). I even make fun of that in Sweet Nothings. The late twentieth century Briton I return to most is probably R. S. Thomas, though. One of Thomas’s poems is even stuck up above my desk, and his battered and taped-up Collected was the first book I took from my office at work when we were kicked out of our building at the start of lockdown. When I finished my undergraduate degree, I quite fancied being a medievalist: I was obsessed with a lot of medieval literature, though probably more for the world it forced my mind and senses to inhabit than for the poetry itself, in most cases. It’s a good job I didn’t try to become one, in a way, because I wouldn’t have got an academic job. Old English poetry comes to us as a huge anomaly, aside from the tradition of poetry in this country, to which it was for so long effectively lost. I’ve always read widely, within and outside of the obvious canon, and not just poets by any means – whatever I find interesting. I’m a serial obsessive hobbyist. Most of the artists and ‘thinkers’ I’m drawn to are people who dared to stand out, to pose difficult questions if they could, who refused to succumb to an orthodoxy, who demonstrated an ability to entertain thoughts without accepting them. They normally paid for it, and normally still do. They loom in me somewhere, and I know how lucky I am.

6. I notice you use a lot of formal structures in your poetry. How important are formal structures for you?

You can play with a received form and use its energy to create something new. The sonnet, for example, comes with a lot of formal and attendant expectations, to the extent that you can break with them quite freely and then purposefully draw on the contrasts. As Don Paterson said, a good sonnet tends to do at least one thing you don’t expect it to. I regard the forms I use, when I use them, a bit more like the way a multi-instrumentalist might view the instruments he or she plays. You’re not going to play a song about a famine on the kazoo, are you? I also like hiding little formal tricks in poems, of the kind that I hope have a positive effect for any reader on the way the poem works, without consciously being noticed. And I think tight, clever rhyme and metre can make wit wittier, because it can. That said, fusty formalism bores the pants off me, and most of the great poems of the past century don’t draw on received forms, at least not ostensibly or thoroughly. I’m not a formalist, I’m a poet who quite often writes metrical poems and occasionally uses received forms.

7. What is your daily writing routine?

I don’t have one. Poems turn up when they turn up, and normally take a long time to get right. And sometimes I come back to them many months after first writing them, or even years later, and worry away at anything that doesn’t quite sit right. I’ve learned to drop poems if I can’t get everything in them to do what I want it to. But I don’t have a set time, or an ideal time, and most days I don’t consciously think about my own poems at all. I write a lot more criticism, though I also think that’s inadvertently part of my process. I’ve done one for almost as long as I’ve done the other.

8. Would you say belonging and estrangement are the motivations for writing your poems?

That seems a bit proscriptive, but it’s probably true. I’ve never fully felt I belong anywhere, but that probably just makes me normal now. Most poems arise from a tension, and that is probably the most consistently present one – whether the subject is my childhood, my invented academic character Bob Pintle, relationships, family, an Albanian keen to get a Green Card, the Bosnian War, being at an American wedding before the 2016 US election, going to a non-league match, or almost anything else I have written poems about about when I come to think about it. I wrote my PhD thesis on belonging and estrangement in late twentieth century British poetry, and the phrase keeps sticking to me in reviews and so on, but I doubt those concerns are more mine than anyone else’s really: they’re just there in the world as we all experience it.

9. How do the writers you read when you were young influence your work today?

I’ve no idea! If you mean the first poets I read of my own volition, mentioned earlier in this exchange, then I still read all of them quite often – some more than others, admittedly. Actually, I have a lot of their poems with me all the time, in my head. That’s the power of a (shortish) poem, though, isn’t it? If you can remember it, you have it whole whenever you want it. No other artform has that. I mean, I can remember a painting or a song, but I can’t look at it or hear it without looking at it or hearing it. I digress. They definitely all influence me to some extent, because they’ve all worked their way into my conscious and subconscious selves and I haven’t rejected any of them. But the weight of that influence on my poems isn’t up to me to decide, and I’m not interested in trying to be like anyone.

10. “University of Life”, Bob Pintle, Had and Held, there are a number of sequences in “Sweet Nothings”, coupled with the idea that they all respond to the quotations before each half of the book, almost as if there is a larger book, as if the whole book is treated as a sequence. It begins with something said and ends on the importance of listening.

I’m glad you noticed that. It’s precisely what I’d hope someone would notice about the book, in that regard. I don’t wish to be didactic, and don’t think I am, but it is a book about learning things, as much as anything else. Learning to listen is part of that. The book’s two sections are both fairly self-contained, though obviously there are connections between them. They aren’t sequences, they’re groupings, ‘mini-books’. But yes, there are a number of sequences within them, and early on in writing these poems I imagined the book might be a sequence of sequences. It didn’t turn out quite like that, but I do like the potential sequences hold for allowing you to chip at one thing from multiple perspectives in poems that might stand alone or apart, but gain something from proximity. ‘Had and Held’ is about splitting up with my ex-wife, the hardest thing I’ve ever done and the hardest thing I’ve ever done by anyone else. Luckily, she forgave me, we’re both happy, and we are extremely close friends. I’ve spoken about ‘University of Life’. The poems about the nearly-real tortured and torturing academic Bob Pintle aren’t technically in a sequence, but they belong with one another. I invented him in the last book, Sarajevo Roses, where he does get a sequence, a day in the life. I wrote about him for the Carcanet blog, here: carcanetblog.blogspot.com/2020/05/rory-waterman-sweet-nothings.html. ‘Garlic’ is a two-part sequence about looking back at looking forward, then trying to remember to look at the present. The first and last words are the same, and the last words of the first part and first of the second are the same. It’s a poem about and full of echoes. You didn’t mention it and nobody else has either, but it’s one of my favourites, and relies on being a sequence.

11.p style=”margin: 0; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11pt;”>Who of today’s writers do you admire the most and why?

That’s too hard to answer. I might just about know where to begin, but I wouldn’t know where to end. I’ll tell you what I do like and don’t see all that much of at present: purposeful contrarianism.

11.1. What do you mean by “purposeful contrarianism”?

Considered, thoughtful alternatives to any cosseted and cosseting status quo. What I might call punk rock spirit, embodied by bands like The Clash and The Specials, though that sounds a bit silly in this context. The ability to see complexity where simplicity reigns, intelligently, even if you’re going to upset the orthodoxy. Most of this has come from the left, broadly conceived: Orwell, Rushdie, Ginsberg, Atwood, Heaney, etc. I don’t always agree with the stances some of these people have taken and – you know what? – that is okay. I’d be more worried if that wasn’t the case. But I recently saw a journalist criticising Orwell for being a ‘vile man’ because he didn’t do enough to take on Nazism or something. I’d like to set that journalist some homework: read Homage to Catalonia, and then tackle Orwell’s essays ‘Antisemitism in Britain’ and ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’. Finally, conduct some research into what your grandparents were doing at the time. That particular journalist wasn’t being purposefully contrarian, he was purposefully saying what he thought would gain him some credibility from other idiots at keyboards who know what they’re talking about even less than he does. How many of the best poems, novels, ideas, have challenged the pervasive or mandated narratives of their day? Tony Harrison’s ‘v.’ would be the first fairly contemporary example of that I remember reading, though it isn’t a very extreme example, and of course the right-wing press wanted to ban that from broadcast, back when the right were stifling free speech rather than pretending to defend it. I like to have my perspectives challenged. That isn’t the only reason I read, of course, by any means. ‘World is crazier and more of it than we think, / Incorrigibly plural’, as McNeice wrote. Good. Let me at it.

11.2. Peter Reading used to do that for me, too. I like the way he designed his whole books and undermined classical form by his word usage. I would also mention Ken Smith, too.

‘Fox Running’ is one of the great neglected long poems of the late twentieth century. I also find his poems about the Balkans moving and complex, for example. Both of the poets you mention are slightly at risk of being forgotten, which is terrible. Complexity, muddiness, is often ignored while simplicity is embraced, but the truth is rarely simple, and where it isn’t, simplicity is a lie. Peter Reading is the epitome of someone who knew enough to know what he meant, and was uncompromising about it. When Nick Everett and I set up New Walk magazine, we arranged for Reading to read at the launch (alongside Alice Oswald). He cancelled because he was ill. I didn’t know he was in fact dying. There aren’t enough poets like that now, not really, unless I’ve missed them – and by ‘like that’ I of course don’t mean exactly like that, but similarly engaged and unfashionably independent and consistently moving, blackly satirical, contrarian, and, frankly, knowledgeable about their art. We aren’t an age of mavericks, because most would-be mavericks are in fact robustly institutionalised. I am an academic, so I’ll shut up about that before I box myself into a corner.

12 Did you choose the picture on the front cover of “Sweet Nothings”?

My friend William Jackson is responsible for the cover. We were at school together, and have been friends since we were about 15. His partner Sarah has been my friend for even longer, and their first child is the dedicatee of a poem in my first poetry collection, Tonight the Summer’s Over. William is a superb artist, and thinks in a way I admire. He’s responsible for most of my book covers, including that of my first book. He produced this one directly in response to the manuscript, which is probably why it is divided in half. It was made by layering two photographs – one from the late 1980s and the other from the 1950s, I think. I don’t know how. Yes, I chose it from a few options, and had a pretty solid idea about how I wanted the text presented, but turning that into a reality better than I imagined was the job of Andrew Latimer at Carcanet. Carcanet books have always looked nice, but they’re gorgeous these days. I love it.

13. What would you say to someone who asked you “How do you become a poet?”

Pay me handsomely. No. Read and think for yourself – really for yourself. That isn’t writing, but it’s a necessary foundation for any writing of value. If you have even a basic aptitude, you can learn a lot about craft, but you have to want to. Technical control isn’t enough on its own, of course, but a poem is indeed a machine made of words. Embrace criticism, but be discerning about how you use it. Expect writing to be difficult: it is for everyone. The truth is, most people can be taught a lot, and anyone who is literate can write, but writing well is exceptionally hard. I only very rarely think I’ve managed it, and I have notebooks full of abortions.

Nobody should feel they can’t enjoy writing, and everybody can learn and grow from doing so. Embrace that, whoever you are. I play the guitar a bit sometimes, and I love it, but I’m never going to end up on stage at the Wembley Arena. Just explore – and if you’re serious, take it seriously.

14. The second poem of Garlic is called “It might repeat On You”, In the first line of the first part “flung off” is repeated. The last stanza of “Trigger Warning, repeats the word “Last”

Yeah. I don’t know what to say about this, other than that sometimes I have used repetition as a rhetorical device, often in the context of oppositions. It’s not just an attempt at fancy footwork: I’m building the tensions inherent in those poems.

15.”Sweet Nothings” ends in a nocturne, and there are two other Nocturnes in the book, both are about events abroad. This last poem in the collection takes place in Nottingham, as if the collection comes home.

Yes, I did want the collection to come home, to land there. Nottingham just happens to be where I live, though: I didn’t care about it ending in Nottingham, just at home in nocturnal meditation, time almost out of time. The three ‘Nocturne’ poems, each set in a different European city, are a legacy from when the typescript had three sections, not two. When I scaled it back, some of the poems lost their place, and others fitted well into one section or the other.

16. Tell me about the writing projects you have on at the moment.

I’ve not written many poems at all since I finished Sweet Nothings. That feels a bit odd, because when I stopped working on Tonight the Summer’s Over at the end of 2012, I just carried on as I always had, and the same thing happened after I finished the typescript for Sarajevo Roses in 2016. I think I know why, though. Quite coincidentally, the earliest poems for Sweet Nothings were written when my life was in sudden and near-total upheaval, and the last ones were written in satisfaction, or something a lot closer to it, which has continued – near-global pandemic-induced meltdown notwithstanding. I assume the poems will come again. Actually, I’m currently working on a collaboration with the Zimbabwean poet Togara Muzanenhamo, which is to some extent about life in these times. I’ve never collaborated before, and I don’t want to curse us, but at present I’m very happy with what we are doing. He chose a loose form for us both to write in, as I hoped he would: I asked him to dictate the form. I love his long, precise lines, his apposite play with the slantiest slant rhymes, the way his poems often unpack ideas, gently and purposefully. I’m learning a lot, anyway. In October, all being well, I am going to Bucheon in South Korea, to be writer in residence. I’m looking forward to seeing where that might take my poetry, and I have some ideas at present, but I might not decide to write many poems for that. I’m very secretive about what I haven’t yet managed to do, so I’ll say no more about it. Most of my current writing projects have been essays, and reviews for Poetry Review, PN Review and the TLS. I reviewed Martha Sprackland’s debut collection Citadel yesterday, and it I haven’t enjoyed a debut more in a long time. I’ve recently finished writing a book on Wendy Cope for Liverpool University Press. That might surprise a few people, and good. She is often extraordinarily wonderful, and nobody is quite like her. I like that.

Care Home

I want to scoop you
from the bed
your scent will leave
no impression here
and carry you back
more than two years
less than one mile
to your ground floor flat
your paintings
the garden
your cat
your summer
birthday bash
gathering of friends
food and wine
sun lettering the grass
with poetry and song
your purple-tipped hair
storming the lessening of days.

i.m. of Jean Millar Lawson 1929-2011

-Eileen Carney Hulme

The Carer 

He considers trains
the light and dark of journeying
the elements earth fire water air

he needs to oil the wheels
his shoulders ache
stooping pushing lifting

springtime, everything coming alive
today they’ll go to the park
maybe he’ll remove her scarf, gloves

shake off the strains of winter
the pressure points
transform the signs of pain

and the wheels turn, let out
a squeak, softly he speaks ‘not far now’
and in the distance a train purrs.

-Eileen Carney Hulme

After The Bones

Yesterday
I thought you were
tired lost blind
to the light that fluttered
through cotton curtains
troubled by silent faces
passing in and out of
your landscape, a darkness
of rivers a burning of hearts

Today
I think you are
waiting beyond sea-lines
beyond wind-drifts, reaching
into the sky multiplying stars
meditating with the moon
nothing frantic about your words
they are low soft whispers
graceful as bird song, sacred at dawn.

Published in Soul Feathers
An anthology in aid of Macmillan Cancer Support

-Eileen Carney Hulme

Why Care?

To prove to myself I can.
I can take the weight,

make the hard choices,
arrange visits to three care homes,

bringtheir literature home
for you to read and say

You choose, Paul.
I choose the rooms that look out

on greenery. Once an old hall,
Old nunnery for my dad,

An old Victorian house
for my Nanna. I visit once

every two weeks for her,
My dad once a week.

Read the care reports for each building
Arrange estate agents for their old homes.

stress to you it is your decision not mine,
foryou to say we trust you, Paul.

i have a lump in my throat.
I make a list and tick it off one by one.

-Paul Brookes

https://literati-magazine.com/a-half-hidden/

-Kate

Waking the Dead 

Going up or down
left or right
there is only corridor,
in slippers
and dressing gown
she takes her daily stroll,
everyone a friend
everyone a stranger

doctors, nurses, social workers
discuss her life
while she is living it,
breakfast at seven
lunch at twelve
dinner at five
bed-pans, sheets changed,
television repeats

she prefers a slow walk –
through windows
she watches
trees empty their leaves
cars empty their visitors
word searching
like a flick of channels.
Perhaps she screams.

Now there are no screams.

-Eileen Carney Hulme

A day in the life of a carer.

I have my list of people today. I’ve got an hour or an hour and a half with everyone. I have buses to catch to every appointment and it’s always a rush between leaving and the next bus.
I love visiting these people. Everyone has different things they need, opinions, hopes and dreams. Sometimes, if I’ve got extra time, and no next person for a good while, I’ll stop over. It’s a chance to talk and for them to see they’re not just a number.

This day I stop. There’s been an accident. A lady is on the floor. No way I can lift her. Her husband is just home from hospital. I call an ambulance. Because she isn’t physically hurt, but can’t get up they’ll arrive as soon as possible as there’s been an emergency. I’m asked to wait. I don’t consider leaving an option. The company I worked for say to leave and let them deal with it. I refuse. They say that they won’t pay me for the shift if I stay. I stay. What sort of carer would I be to walk away? In the end my hour becomes three and a half. All unpaid. A paramedic car is there first, then we’re to wait for an ambulance. It’s been a crazy day.
But, if it were my parents would I want them left, frightened and uncared for? I’d like to hope that someone else would stay because it’s what carers do. They care. Beyond the money aspect. We just care.

AilsaCawleyPoetry2020

-Jim

aide

a cigarette
won’t change
anything, lucy

it won’t dry your eyes
or bring back those
you can’t misunderstand
anymore
or pretend again they are
more than less

your break is done
so take one long drag
hold it under your skin
under the layer
of another goodbye

-Elizabeth Moura

-Richard Waring

Put me in a place

Put me where I smell the air
Put me in a window
Rolling purple heather hills
To front or side

Let me smell the peaty richness
Let me see spring dance
Outside that window
I told you of

Please don’t let me face a wall
Or be trapped in an airless room
Give me my own few things
Where someone chats with me
Just talking of daily things
Without presuming I didn’t always
Live in the shell I’m now trapped

Once I walked the hills I see
Climbed the hills I watch
I’m still a part of them until
You force me to turn from them
They are my memories and life

-AilsaCawleyPoetry2020

.thank you for asking.

thank you for asking and the answer
would be quicker if I had cut my nails
to bounce the keyboard here

funny you should ask as i was thinking
over this yesterday while walking

how

it felt unfair that after all those years
of housekeeping
keeping his house clean
tidy, fitting in with all his
timetables and breathing

not breathing

that

she had to go to the home quietly
where she remained quietly

her daughter also went later
and remain quiet

i lived in a home in milton road
milton house, place of nighmare
for us kids

wettened beds
stinking laundry

deleted

so I stayed quiet

so thank you so much for asking
and being so thoughtful yet I tell

you clearly
that I do not want a care situation ever
for all the good it will do, so i won’t stay

quiet now
forgive me

I hope your dad had green in his view

other colours too

-sbm

This is written about my Nana who was going into a home permanently, after a temporary home to recover from heart attacks and falls and she couldn’t manage at home anymore. This is her viewpoint to my Dad who felt bad for not having room to take her in

Don’t feel bad, laddie. I know it’s not that you don’t want me. Whatever I say won’t cut it, will it, son? You see I’m used to my own space, my way of doing things. I’m pretty sure I can have that here. The room is a big one. The bed faces the light and I can watch the sky. They wanted me to face the door. The door’s a bore. The sky has pictures and it’s like a moving picture house if I look. I’ve time to do it, now. I’ll miss popping to Liptons for tea, and Woolworths for lunch. But you know I have plenty to keep me busy. I talk to people. Some say I’m nosey and say too much. But these young ones, seem to come to me for guidance. So I don’t care what anyone thinks of me. They’re in a bad relationship, I’ll tell them and say if they’re being taken advantage of. How can they be strong when nobody teaches them when to say no? So I’ll stay here, and dole out the advice to them as want it. Sometimes them as don’t! My days are full. I don’t stay in the communal rooms much. The ones who are going in their mind scare me a bit. I’m scared it’s catching and I’m not being next. I do stay when they sing though. Or when they bring in the history people who ask about my life as a child. I wasn’t always old. I didn’t always have a dicky heart. I didn’t always fall for nowt. But that was then son. I’ve got a few new books. I love these spy stories. They sound exciting to us normal folk. It’s sunny out there and I want to go a walk. Leazes Park in the sun or something nice. I’ll close my eyes a moment and think of childhood, my children and grandchildren. That daughter of yours will be in later. I’ll tell her some stories. She likes my old days chatter. I have all her secrets. You go son, I’m tired. Don’t you worry about me.

Wombwell Rainbow Interviews

I am honoured and privileged that the following writers local, national and international have agreed to be interviewed by me. I gave the writers three options: an emailed list of questions or a more fluid interview via messenger, or an interview about their latest book, or a combination of these.
The usual ground is covered about motivation, daily routines and work ethic, but some surprises too. Some of these poets you may know, others may be new to you. I hope you enjoy the experience as much as I do.

Tessa B, Berring

‘I like lean words,/ you know, like ‘spirit’/ and lightly placed / unspeakable things’.

Tessa Berring’s collection Bitten Hair was published in 2019 by Blue Diode Press. Further work can be found via Dancing Girl Press, Algia Magazine, Pamenar Press, Rabbit Catastrophe, and Datableedzine.

The Interview

1. When and why did you start writing poetry?

Well poetry is stunning. It stuns – I wanted to join in. I love the way you can read a poem and feel ‘yes, yes, oh my god, aaagh, that’s it!’ It answers. It enquires.

And poetry is a form of longing. Longing has always been an inspiration to me. The inherent uncertainty of it, the urge to reach, to open up, to lean

2. Who introduced you to poetry?

My parents were the first people to read and show me poetry – nursery rhymes, story books, prayers, songs. And just talking introduces one to poetry doesn’t it? I’ve always been in awe of speech – how an idea, or a feeling becomes heard, becomes language.

3. How aware are and were you of the dominating presence of older poets traditional and contemporary?

Aware of the dominating presence of older poets?.. Yes. Always….Well, some poets are simply always there taking up space. In mainstream UK bookshops you will always find Philip Larkin! But it isn’t his fault he’s got stuck forever on the high street – it is the cloying nature of capitalism and its stale (dead white male) imagination.

Poetry I love is poetry that lives aware of but in resistance to ‘dominating presences’ or ideas of ‘authority’. Poetry that guides and inspires through ever shifting writing communities, that spits and breathes through small presses, intimate collaborations, generous readings, no limp and docile magazine.

If poetry has a power, it is its sensuality, its sharp insanity, and the multiple ways that it can veer.

4. What is your daily writing routine?

I don’t have a writing routine. I write when I want to, or when I can . Usually at night and at home.

5. What motivates you to write?

I love listening to conversations. Often it is an overheard phrase, a couple of lines in a book, or online that will start me writing…. Or it could be a disagreement I want to untangle/be rid of, or the love of an image I want to look at for longer. Sometimes it is an emotion I want to channel somewhere. Words are good for that; transformative, tender, blunt, and bony things.

I rarely write with a sense of wanting to write ‘about’ something. It is always something more immediate, sudden. And often I’m left with nothing except the feeling of ‘having written’.

Perhaps that is the motivation – to write so as to have that feeling? I find it hard to know my own motivations. I am not politically motivated to write, but at the same time I believe that all good poetry is political. It challenges. It agitates. It finds (and obscures) meaning.

6. What is your work ethic?

My work ethic? I try not to have a work ethic around poetry.
Poems are survivors not products. Writing a poem never feels like ‘work’ – it feels free and visceral. The best poems are bloody – something like muscle or a heartbeat. Though sometimes the best poems are like birds and outrageous laughter.

7. How do the writers you read when you were young influence your work today?

All writers influence me. Or all writing influences me. Even writing I hate influences me. It shows me the edges and the stinking troughs! As a young girl I loved Paul Gallico and Muriel Spark: Love of Seven Dolls and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie contain everything – Darkness, naivety, humour, sex, betrayal, sadness, warmth, insight…

8. Who of today’s writers do you admire the most and why?

Who do I admire now? I find that question harder and harder the more I read. It becomes hard to separate ones reading into individual writers. Is that a cop out? It probably is. I love reading what friends are writing and reading. I like to pick up books in shops for their covers. I like finding obscure texts on mind theory online, etc.

9. Why do you write, as opposed to doing anything else?

I’m never opposed to doing anything else, but I write when I know that it is only words that will get me close enough to what I am looking for, to what feels imperative in that moment.

10. What would you say to someone who asked you “How do you become a writer?”

I would say I can’t answer that. Or I would ask ‘What do you mean?

11. Tell me about the writing projects you have on at the moment.

I always have a little heap/smatter of words sitting in my laptop and which I tune into most days, not every day, but sometimes everyday. It is easy to get bored/disillusioned too. To feel ‘oh yes, here’s another unnecessary poem’. I’d like to work away from that – to make everything feel valuable.

Foot Reading – Haibun

this is not a kindness
a duty, or a religious metaphor
it is inherent

I fill two basins, rising steam dampens my face, add a few squirts of green, stray bubbles pop against the kitchen window. I ask you to dip a toe, you nod approval, lift the lead weight of your feet, they drop like lumps of land breaking free of the cliffs and falling into sea, sink beneath the surface. Your face relaxes.

blackbirds drop from tree
searching for breakfast leftovers
find nothing but bugs

Every Sunday night (whether I needed it or not, we laugh) you ran my bath, poured in Matey for bubble mohawks, tossed in multi-coloured Tupperware. After being swaddled in cotton, I’d run downstairs and would sit on your knee, in the fireside chair, while you dried my hair and between each individual toe, tickled my feet. Compare the single freckle we both have on our right little piggy.

sky turns from orange to red
pink and purple as dusk descends
swifts swoop in circles

Now, your toes sufficiently wrinkled, callouses waxy white, I ease each foot out, wrap them in the towel. Deformed feet, big toes bunioned, corns on phalanges; the result of too many dances in stiletto heeled winkle pickers. The scissors can cut anything, according to your QVC god, and I have tested this by gliding through a tin of ham.

baby mice, transparent
pink wrinkles, jump from nest
into jack russell’s teeth

In turn, I take these to both parents’ feet. You have shared fifty-three years and your fungal infections, with each other. Twenty toenails in shades of banana mousse, cream cake and custard, ribbed like palm trees or the shells on the beach.

found in pocket
one heart-shaped stone, polished
smooth by your thumb

I remember going to the Mournes each Easter Monday, to skim for smicks in the Shimna, then later after a picnic of egg and onion sandwiches, tea and biscuits, I would paddle in the Irish Sea, look for razor shells, driftwood, mermaids’ purses. Sitting in the boot of the Austin Allegro while you would dry my feet. Carefully pulling the towel between my toes to remove every grain of sand.

-Gaynor Kane ( poem first appeared in The North)

..old blanket..

I watch the blanket breathe,
hope it will never stop.
white, cellular, keeping warm,
the one I love, so vehemently.
scares me, this intensity of feeling,
that never stops,
and continues when the blanket lays quiet……

-sbm.

Spinning Plates

People looked on in wonder, impatiently said
I really don’t know what goes on in that head!
Sometimes so patronising, what can you say?
How on earth do you guess where he is today
Open your eyes you ignorant jerk
Sit quiet a while, it’s hardly work
To still your mind, quell your tongue
He can hear your comments, they stung.
Your back to him, he’s shaking his head
Heard every damned word that you said
Yes, he wanders, him it frustrates
In his head thoughts like spinning plates
Not a juggler, a circus clown sometimes they crash
Fall to the ground, to many shards smash
Don’t you think he’d say if he could?
Doesn’t want this, he ISN’T a fool
So sitting quietly, happy by your side
We talk of things you’d always hide
Subjects varied that you have to share
Your loves, passions, compelled to air
Instead of feeling like you’ve nothing to say
I try to savour your words each day
Knowing soon that this chance will end
When your man in black returns, on you to tend
You know what’s happening you aren’t dense
Can’t they just apply some common sense?
Shaking your head you roll your eyes
Patience lost, listening to sighs
You know they are tired, but you are too
You’ve fought so long, they have no clue
Tenacity making you fight till you’ve won
That’s when you’re ready for the setting sun
Time to leave the world mortals see
Through the door you’re going to be
Talking, laughing and chatting a while
In your voice I hear your sparkling smile
Tell me ‘she’s here ‘ and ‘is it okay to go?’
I have to say yes because I know
You’re happy to see it’s your beloved mother
The fight, battle given up for no other
Knew she was coming for you long before
Take her hand, go through the open door
Gently you lie there closing your eyes
All worries gone, said the goodbyes
I know should I need you where to look
Said you’d be down by the babbling brook
I’d only to call if I didn’t manage to see
And like always and forever you’d appear to me.

=AilsaCawleyPoetry2015

Generation Gap

You said, “This isn’t my world,” and then
You shook your head.
That look, deep
In your distant eyes, said
Everything that needed
To be said. And, your modesty,
In that moment of clarity,
Commanded
More respect than my
Inclination might have granted,
Because you said, “I really don’t
Know what I’m talking about. This isn’t my world…No,
It’s not my time.”
But I am moved to want to somehow
Merge your world with mine.

-st

Only One Heart

We are symmetrical
Beings – those of us who can call
Ourselves fortunate
Enough
To live in a body
Without injury
Or disease.
We have these
Two beautiful ears
With which to hear
Our creator’s call, and eyes to see,
And arms and legs and feet.
Though we have but one
Metronome-
Heart with which to live
And spend it how we choose: to take, or give.

-st