Window 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 two options: an emailed list of questions or a more fluid interview via messenger.
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.

Sarah James/Leavesley

(http://sarah-james.co.uk) is a prize-winning poet, fiction writer, journalist and photographer. Author of seven poetry titles, two novellas and a touring poetry-play, she’s been published by the Guardian, Financial Times and in the Blackpool Illuminations. Sarah runs The Poetry Society’s Worcestershire Stanza and V. Press poetry and flash fiction imprint (http://vpresspoetry.blogspot.com/). 2018 books: Always Another Twist (Mantle Lane Press) and How to Grow Matches (Against The Grain Press).

Wombwell Rainbow Interviews

1. What inspired you to write poetry?

Feeling intense beauty and emotions with little time (because of work or my children) to really feel or write about them in anything but the briefest snatches.

“To write songs of flight in italics
against grey skies, and dig out

the worms that dirt hides. To carry dawn
home in my silky down, spread light

across fields and town, then balance
stillness in the winter’s stark trees.”

(From ‘Fierce Love’, The Magnetic Diaries, Knives Forks And Spoons Press, 2015, collection highly commended in the Forward Prizes)

2. Who introduced you to poetry?

My mum, church, school. Poetry of one sort or another, with or without the overt music of nursery rhymes or hymns, has always been all around me. William Blake’s work, especially ‘The Tyger’(https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43687/the-tyger), resonates particularly strongly in my memory from childhood – finding its way out later in some of my poems.

“I am the tiger. Stripes alight, my bright
eyes burn two holes in the night as I blaze
fearful forests with my gaze; search my self
for the slightest trace of symmetry.”

(From ‘Welcome to the Zoo’, Into the Yell,(http://www.circaidygregory.co.uk/intotheyell.htm) Circaidy Gregory Press, 2010, third prize in International Rubery Book Awards 2011)

But I think I’ve also made a fair few references to T.S. Eliot’s poems too in my own work over the years, as well as many other writers.

3. How aware were you of the dominating presence of older poets?

I’m very aware of presence and influence – it’s there in everything I read (and all I experience). But I wouldn’t describe it as dominating. It’s just there, and it’s natural that it should be there. It can be indirectly useful to me, as in re-reading Ted Hughes’s ‘Thistles’ (https://www.faber.co.uk/blog/thistles/)many times while writing ‘Endurance’ for plenty-fish (Nine Arches Press, 2015), (http://ninearchespress.com/publications/poetry-collections/plenty-fish.html) where:

“Stubborn roots draw up strength
from the land’s glacial inheritance…”

Or it can be the spring-board for a more explicitly direct response, as in ‘From His Uncoy Mistress, 2016’, where:

“Your words rise up to meet me
at the most awkward times –
now poised on a crest of surf
ready to claim the perfect wave;
only my own body to hold in balance…”

(From ‘From his Uncoy Mistress, 2016, How to Grow Matches, Against The Grain Press, 2018, shortlisted in International Rubery Book Awards 2018)

These words referred to are actually the ex-lover’s in the narrative. But the poem itself is a response to Andrew Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’. Taken on their own, my first two lines above could also apply to the writing influence process. Personally, I tend to find others’ great writing mostly inspires me to try harder, craft better, strive for something differently striking. I guess one particularly slightly daunting figure for me though, as a woman who’s written a lot, but not exclusively, on themes of womanhood, depression and mental illness is Sylvia Plath. In this case, her presence is maybe a counter-force rather than my wanting to follow in her footsteps. Her writing is totally unique. I’d aspire to that level of uniqueness more than Plath’s style.

4. What is your daily writing routine?

I don’t have a strict routine as such. There’s always too much to do for the time available, so I have prioritising systems to ease both writing and general workflow. For example, I use personal, competition and submission deadlines to focus me and make me edit. I became a reviewer for Riggwelter to allow me to prioritise some reading above other jobs. I’ve also learned the hard way to listen to my own energy levels and fit different tasks to the right time/mood, rather than battle to get something done immediately when I’m in the wrong frame of mind. What takes five hours at the wrong time can take 5 minutes in the right headspace. This is particularly true for me on a long tiring day when going to bed is likely to mean I can power away first thing the next morning rather than try to get something finished that night, fail and then wake up still exhausted. One thing I have to have in my daily routine is exercise, preferably outdoors, to balance my energy levels, generate ‘feel-good’ hormones, get a sense of greater perspective and also so my subconscious can pace out editing problems in a way that keeps the words in rhythm. I guess this might all reduce down to a guiding writing mantra that’s somewhere between the following:

“With me, without me, the clock’s hands pierce crimson wormholes…”

(From ‘Blue’, Be[yond], Knives Forks And Spoons Press, 2013)

“Rain presses its rhythms into earth skin;
our heartbeats glisten.”

(From ‘Laptop TV’, Hearth, Mothers Milk Books, 2015)

5. What motivates you to write?

Intense beauty, emotion or wonder. Trying to understand or capture something important through snapshots in words, such as:

Raindrop on a Red Leaf

His hand cupping a spider, wrist trembling;
a thin branch in the wind,

or the lurch of lungs and stomach when a plane
takes off and the world sinks away,

or the first bead of bone clearly conceived
from that scan’s black smudge.

Suspension of time itself, the moment’s
gasp of skin and lips,

when the whole future balances
on the wet leaves of two tongues.”

(From plenty-fish, Nine Arches Press, 2015, shortlisted in International Rubery Book Awards 2016)

I guess also part of this may be trying to hold onto, or guard against forgetting, important moments in life.

“Ada thinks of Babcia and what it must be
to live with no past, just a flickering now
traced in fragments on an unstill surface.

“Even the things she’d will to forget
are part of her heart’s pulse.”

(Lampshades & Glass Rivers, part XIV, Loughborough University, 2016, Overton Poetry Prize Winner 2015)

The analogy of authors in some ways being like gods in terms of their creations is one that’s been used a lot. But I think authors’ power isn’t without a darker, more devilish, side (as suggested maybe by my quoted lines in answer to the second question above). Also, when I start a new piece of writing, I often feel the inspiration and characters are as much in control of me as vice versa. Control returns to my hands more in the editing stage.

6. What is your work ethic?

“I am the cochineal beetle who bleeds
ink willingly. I’d grind my own body
to find the answers; spell them out in red
while the cactus quill spears me as I write.”

(From ‘Welcome to the Zoo’, Into the Yell, Circaidy Gregory Press, 2010, third prize in International Rubery Book Awards 2011)

Work hard, then work harder? Try, try and try again? I’ve been diabetic from the age of 6, so I have a strong striving cycle built into me, with a need to prove something – that I’m not faulty despite the disability, that I won’t be stopped from doing things because of the diabetes… Of course, in reality, my life isn’t the same as someone without diabetes, never could be. But the same is true of lots of conditions and circumstances. Overall, I get satisfaction from a job well done, and I am someone who bores easily, so I like to always be doing something. I’ve learned with age that balance and down-time are an important part of work, both for recharging energy and also because some procrastination gives creativity space to happen, allowing ideas to arise from the subconscious. These days, I try to adapt ‘work hard’ to ‘work smart’, and then smarter!

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

All of them. I think everything I’ve experienced is part of my life and part of me in some way. Traces of this thread through this interview. One author I’ve not mentioned and ought to in terms of my fiction is Jane Austen. As a child, I felt her novels were all very similar in terms of plot but I absolutely loved her free indirect speech style. Her influence is there in many of my third-person flashes, but also my two short companion novellas from Mantle Lane Press: Kaleidoscope (2017) and Always Another Twist (2018).

“Claire stares at her life – a painted brick box, 8ft by 10ft. It’s small but at least it means she can shut out the world, almost pretend she isn’t there. Instead, she’s on a palm-tree beach, the sun on her face, a cocktail in her hand, warmth beneath her bare feet. Or she’s staring out over a clam blue ocean: seals are soft, curved and shiny on the rocks, dolphins arc through the air, spray falls in rainbows. If she’s lucky, there’s a baby in her arms. And if she’s not? Well, she’s still somewhere else, anywhere but here…” (Kaleidoscope)

“Betrayal always has a name, Julie sees that now. This name as familiar as a best friend’s or partner’s. But, once betrayal has a name: Lucy, it also has a face that can be made to cry, a heart that will bleed.
“After discovering what her boss, Lucy, has been up to, Julie’s a cauldron of anger and frustration…” (Always Another Twist)

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

I tend to admire writing rather than writers, and I don’t hierarch them. I have eclectic reading tastes, so what I like and admire most differs a lot, depending on what reading or writing ‘zone’ I happen to be in at any given time. All my collections have poems written ‘after’ or referencing other writers – across a broad range including contemporary writers like Lyn Hejinian, to name just one. At the moment, I’m finding a lot of writing inspiration and admiration outdoors, in nature and from poets like Lorine Niedecker, Gillian Allnutt, Mark Goodwin…

Too Modest

after Lorine Niedecker

Lone ‘plover’:
contents shaped
from marsh mud & Rock banks

That anon can
thru which cut
lines shine

A rhythm river trimmed
with reeds,
silver fish & light slivers

(From plenty-fish, Nine Arches Press, 2015, shortlisted in International Rubery Book Awards 2016)

When I won second prize and a commended in the 2018 Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine, it was an even greater delight because Mark Doty and Carol Rumens were judges.
I was also very lucky to have Michael Symmons Roberts and Jean Sprackland as portfolio supervisors on my masters – amazing to get feedback and advice from two poets whose work I really admire.

Of course, for every writer I might mention here, there are x others I’d have unintentionally missed off. There’s a lot of great and inspiring poetry out there!

9. Why do you write?

Because I can’t not write. Writing doesn’t feel like a conscious choice, more something that’s part of me, so happens whether I want to do it or not. I love the creative and inspiration part of the process but editing is a mixture of delight (when the metalwork starts to gleam) and frustration (when it refuses to shine no matter how hard I polish). On top of language’s inexactness and the almost impossible act of balancing rhythm, sound, imagery, meaning (some compromise somewhere nearly always has to be made), being a published writer comes with other anxieties. These worries include how the work will be received, if my writing actually achieves anything, if I should be doing something more useful…to the point sometimes of:

“I’ve stopped writing poetry because…

my children have eaten all the pens,
the mouse won’t click right,
my smart screen has frozen,
and the keyboard ‘e’ keeeeeps sticking;”

Full poem on Amaryllis Poetry here.

Of course, this circles right back round to the start of my answer. Though I often feel like not writing, it’s so much part of me that however long this feeling may last, I’m more likely to end up writing about this feeling than actually definitively stop writing! And this is another of the infinite number of true answers I could give to this question – a desire to create something of beauty or meaning, even out of pain, maybe especially out of pain.

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

Make sure that you’ve got loads of mice and your children don’t eat pens! The problem with advice is that it’s often too generic, not individual. I’d say that for myself I didn’t become a writer, writing has always been in me. In terms of working as a writer or becoming published, there are lots of website, journals and books out there that might help (such as How to be a Poet, Nine Arches Press). I’d also suggest interacting with other readers and writers, find out what’s worked (and not worked) for them, then decide what might work for you.

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

I’ve two potential poetry collections and two pamphlets that I keep tinkering with now and then but haven’t done anything with yet. I also have a memoir that was longlisted in the New Welsh Writing Awards, which I’m not sure where to go next with. A lot of my time is currently taken up running V. Press poetry and flash fiction imprint though, which means my personal slots of creativity are quite short, so more at the level of individual poems or flashes.

Another thing that I’ve become increasingly interested in in our highly social mediaed world is combining poetry and photography. Two of my own haiku-influenced ‘photo-poems’ can be found below. But I also recently started an online journal to open this up to other writers. In LitWorld2, I combine others’ short poems or 100-word flashes with my photos to create Pic Pocket a Poem or Snap Up a Flash images which can be used by the writer and are shared through Instagram and other social media, as well as on the journal.

Thank you, Paul, for such thought-provoking questions!
Thank you, Paul, for such thought-provoking

Wombwell Rainbow Interviews

I am honoured and privileged that the following poets, local, national and international have agreed to be interviewed by me. I gave the writers two options: an emailed list of questions or a more fluid interview via messenger.
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.

 

Sonja Benskin Mesher

Sonja lives in Dolgellau, North Wales. She is an Academician of the Royal Cambrian Academy. And has worked full-time as an artist since 1999. She explores different ways to communicate thoughts and concerns.

The Interview

by no means finished; let the conversation continue…..
1. What were the circumstances under which you began to write poetry?

i  was asked to support a blog site and the response was that what I wrote was verse

I thought

so be it.

2. Who introduced you to poetry?

not sure, possibly school with the rhyming gallopy stuff,like

‘the road was a ribbon of moonlight’

which

made pictures in my head

3. How aware were you of the dominating presence of older poets?

not at all aware

4. What is your daily writing routine?

no real routine, that may be an issue

i write when it comes

daily

mostly
5. What motivates you to write?

those  things around me, things are said, overheard and remembered

history, news

writing

it means the dust will not settle, and each small thing has importance. it gives me voice

with
a rhythm of sounds, words and all feelings

I find that when I cannot draw it, photograph it I can at least describe it

layer it
i started writing

a long time back, in my head. I started writing it on paper, perhaps 10 years now

6. Why do you write poetry?

to commemorate the times, and happenings, to let the secrets  free

7. i like glyn hughes.

8. i think you asked what advice I have for others…..

just do it really, keep doing it

your own way.

there really are no rules ( think on this)

Sonja Benskin Mesher RCA UA

information-

http://www.sonja-benskin-mesher.com
/http://sonjabenskinmesher.wordpress.com/diary/

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 two options: an emailed list of questions or a more fluid interview via messenger.
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.

Scarlett Ward

is a 25 year old Poet, Witch and snail mama working from staffordshire, UK. She has had poetry featured in anthologies and literature journals from presses such such as Verve Poetry, Hedgehog Press and Fly On The Wall Publishing.

The Interview

1. What inspired you to write poetry?

My mom brought me up with stories of unicorns and fairies and it meant I always had a very romantic magical imagination. As I got older I used my writing as a way to process my emotions, deal with life around me and react to the universe I live in.

2. Who introduced you to poetry?

I remember the first poem I ever fell in love with was The Highway Man by Alfred Noyes when I was around 10. It was so tragically romantic it just broke my little heart. It’s still one of my favourite poems of all time! I can’t remember my teacher’s name but she sparked a love affair with poetry!

3. How aware were you of the dominating presence of older poets?

The term “older” is tricky. I am quite a young poet at 25, and there are a lot of older people within the literature world purely because they have worked at it for longer because they have existed for longer. There is a really great representation of younger poets in Birmingham, with many youthful poetry evenings targeted at younger demographics. I don’t particularly think that the presence of older poets is domineering or in any way a bad thing though, I accept all the help I can from more experienced people!

4. What is your daily writing routine?

Whilst I do make time to write I don’t think I have so much of a routine. I don’t treat it as a chore, I make sure I allow myself time to write before work and when I get free time on evenings, but my phone is filled with notes I’ve written because I’ve thought of something on the go.

5. What motivates you to write?
Whenever I read poetry that I really connect with, I feel that gut-wrenching soul ache, or I feel like I’ve been seen in a crowd, as though I’ve been recognised and I’m not alone. The idea that I can have that kind of affect on people through my writing is what drives me.

6. What is your work ethic?

The more you write the more you write. ALSO The more you read the more you write! If you’re feeling writers block the best medicine is to read!

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

When I was younger I used to read a lot of easily-consumable poetry like Michael Faudet and Rupi Kaur. I think that was a great doorway into the world of poetry, and it definitely still influences me in that I feel poetry should have a bold statement to it, but I felt as I matured I learned to be patient with my poems and take more time to expand on points.

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

I really adore Cheryl Pois’ “Oysterlight” because it contains some of the most gently beautiful imagery I have come across in a long time. I have read that book over and over, lent it to girlfriends, screenshott’ed pages to send to my mom, all sorts. I really admire the way she writes such powerful poetry using such soft language. Reading her book is like being bowled over by a butterfly wing. She is also such a lovely person!

(I deleted Q9 I felt it was covered in Q5)

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

Just write. Hone your craft. Read as much as you can. Join writing workshops where you can discuss your work and get feedback. Go to poetry nights and make like-minded friends; that’s half the fun!

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

I’m currently working on my manuscript for my own collection. I love to make little art/poetry zines by hand which I sell on my etsy shop and I also make small trinkets like bookmarks, lockets and frames. I’m going to apply for the Staffordshire Laureateship in 2019 too so it’s going to be a busy year!

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 two options: an emailed list of questions or a more fluid interview via messenger.
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.

A collection of front cover images of her books heads Kristin’s website.

Kristin Garth

is a Pushcart & Best of the Net nominated sonnet stalker.  Her poetry has stalked magazines like Glass, Yes, Five:2: One, Anti-Heroin Chic, Former Cactus, Occulum, Luna Luna, & many more.  She has a chapbook Pink Plastic House (Maverick Duck Press), three forthcoming: Pensacola Girls (Bone & Ink Press, Sept 2018) and Shakespeare for Sociopaths (The Hedgehog Poetry Press Jan 2019), Puritan U (Rhythm & Bones Lit March 2019) Her full length, Candy Cigarette, is forthcoming April 2019 (The Hedgehog Poetry Press). Follow her on Twitter:  (
@lolaandjolie), her weekly poetry column (https://www.rhythmnbone.com/sonnetarium)
rhythmnbone.com/sonnetarium) and her website (http://kristingarth.wordpress.com)
kristingarth.wordpress.com).

The Interview

1. When and why did you start to write poetry?

I started writing poetry when I was a little girl, free verse.  It was mostly to deal with abuse issues and a traumatic homelife.  I wrote my first sonnet as a high school assignment.  In college I continued doing that and got a partial creative writing scholarship based on them.  I dropped out of grad school to establish my financial independence and became a stripper.  Even in that milieu I wrote some sonnets.  I’ve always married modern themes with the form.

2. Who introduced you to poetry?

I read poetry as a child from the childish stuff Silverstein to Poe.  They had a huge effect on me but the biggest influence was a poet from the Ozarks who came to speak at my school.  He was the first living poet I met.  He read from his book, and he was from a small town like me.Even as a child I think I associated poetry as a thing people from big places did — professors and such.  It was when i realized someone from a small place could be charismatic and own a room.

2.1 When did you realise you could own a room?

I don’t think I have realized that reading in person.  I know I haven’t because I have never successfully done it.  In grad school, we were forced to do it but I couldn’t make it through my poem.  And I dropped out so I never won that battle.

I only recently started recording audios of poems. I love that, and people seem to enjoy them.  At first I was terrified and thought my voice was too babyish and quiet and not professional.  I’ve learned though there is a power in all of that.

I recently got asked to be the voice of Rhythm & Bones Lit Which records their editor’s picks of the best pieces in the magazine.  I will be recording those.  It’s crazy to me to think only a year ago I was battling my insecurity about my voice and now I’m being asked to read other people’s work.  Maybe I will conquer the public readings one day too.

 

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

Well as a girl who writes Shakespearean sonnets primarily, I am totally dominated in a sense by a 400 year old poet.  I try to follow his form though I’m a rebel and I play loosely at times.  It obviously doesn’t bother me to have buses and influences.  I feel like my content is a beast and it requires a time-tested, solid cage.  The cage frees me so I can release my rage and passion.

4. What is your daily writing routine?

Right now I’m at a Starbucks with earphones in.  I just finished a sonnet and sent it to a magazine that was expecting it.  Since it was one I wrote from an alternate POV, I sent it to a couple of female poet friends I respect to read it.  Sometimes I do that when I feel out of my comfort zone or unsure.

I write every day.  I was attempting for the first time in two years to take a week off of writing.  I just finished a chapbook on my sexual assault at a Christian college, and it was grueling.  It’s called Puritan U, and it is being published by Rhythm  & Bones Lit in March next year.  It is an important but grueling book.  And it’s my fourth solo chapbook in two years, so even for a Capricorn I though I earned a break.  I made it two whole days, and here I am back in the Starbucks, doing the thing.

5. What motivates your writing?

I am definitely motivated by my own need to extricate a poison from my body.  I write about traumas, power imbalances I have experienced or seen that shaped me.  I carry these things inside like burdens, and the physical act of putting them on paper is like an exorcism of a darkness — or at least a layer of it.

As a person who was abused, who was expected to keep secrets, to keep up appearances, owning the ugliness of life and experience is extremely empowering to me.  Putting my name to a piece of paper telling a shameful story, it says I am in a whole different world than I was as a child.  The first poem I published was a fetish poem, for example, and it’s the only one I ever used an alias because I lived at home.  I was not safe.  The act of writing provocative things and owning them is such a celebration of the free state of my soul these days.

6. What is your work ethic?

My work ethic is pretty intense.  I’m a Capricorn, and work is intrinsic to our nature.  One of my best writing friends Tianna Hansen who is the editor of Rhythm & Bones is a Capricorn too, and it’s why her magazine is such a force of nature.  Capricorns live to work.  When we take breaks, it is only for the sake of the work.

I had to have this pep talk with my self to force myself to take a week Writing break: it will make you come back so strong.  I only made it two days.  I do feel stronger though.  I live to write.  Everything in my life supports that.  That is my purpose.

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

I feel Poe’s influence in a lot of my gothic sonnets.  On his birthday last year I wrote a sonnet that was published in Moonchild Magazine called A Geography of Loneliness.  You can read it here:
(link: https://www.moonchildmag.net/kristingarth3.html)
moonchildmag.net/kristingarth3.… — it was a tribute to Poe, using the language of horror to describe a mental landscape I felt.  I latched on to dark writing in my youth because it spoke to my troubled soul, and I think it’s ambience reflects the dim geography of my past that I carry around still in my heart.

I also read about the Salem witch trials.  I have a huge attraction to that period in American History when Puritans really controlled things, women were so constricted to very limited, rigid roles and completely without power.  Sadly, though women have a lot more rights, in our current political climate, I feel a lot of resonance with this time period.

Also having attended a Christian college in a state (Utah) where the division between church and state is maybe the most clouded of any I have ever experienced, I personally relate to this.  It’s why I named my fourth solo chapbook Puritan U.

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

I love so many poets like Chen Chen, Justin Karcher, Joanna Valente,  Kailey Tedesco.  I love vivid images and fearless writing.  I also love novelists like Joyce Carol Oates, Chuck Palahniuk, Caroline Kepnes, Bret Easton Ellis, Dave Eggers, I love writing that uses darkness, gothic horror themes even to illustrate power imbalances and stark truths.  I’m reading a book right now Dietland by Sarai Walker that is another awesome social commentary in a great page turner of a novel.

 

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

I know people who went the school route to writing — as I did for part of my journey. I don’t regret it at all.  I’m very glad for my education even if I didn’t fully complete my Master’s degree.  It taught me a lot about reader reaction to my work and exposed me to so many styles of writing.

I would say to find an experience where you can workshop your work and gain critique from others.  If that is school great, if that is a website — I personally when I returned to writing used the website Scribophile.  It toughens you up as a writer to have your work critiqued by others.

Even if you don’t change things based on the critiques it causes you to sharpen things about your writing, if only to clarify your objectives.  It teaches you about your writing, even just defending it.  Sometimes you learn things too – crutches you don’t know you have.  It prepares you for the world of editors which can be intimidating and harrowing and such an education.

I personally don’t critique anymore but I use friends who are poets as sounding boards when I’m unsure.

10. Tell me more about the writing projects you are involved in.

Published Work
kristingarth.com
As I’ve stated before about writing projects, I just finished my fourth solo book, Puritan U.  It wlll come out in March.  I have a chapbook out currently available at Maverick Duck (my publisher) and my website
(link: http://kristingarth.com)
kristingarth.com.  I have another one that is all Shakespearean sonnets on sociopaths called Shakespeare for Sociopaths that will be released in January from The Hedgehog Poetry Press.  In April that press will also release my full length poetic memoir on stripping in the Deep South in pigtails and cheerleading uniforms called Candy Cigarette Womanchild Noir.  So having said all this week I am just writing poems and not thinking of the next big project.  If you interview me in a week though I’ll probably be contemplating my next big book — Capricorn problems.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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 two options: an emailed list of questions or a more fluid interview via messenger.
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.

David Wheatley

Amazon tells us “David Wheatley was born in Dublin in 1970. His previous collections are ‘Thirst’ (1997; Rooney Prize for Irish Literature), ‘Misery Hill’ (2000), ‘Mocker’ (2006) and ‘A Nest on the Waves’ (2010). His work has appeared in numerous anthologies, including ‘The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry’, and has been awarded a variety of prizes, including the Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize and first prize in the Friends Provident National Poetry Competition. His critical study ‘Contemporary British Poetry’ is published by Palgrave. He lives in rural Aberdeenshire.”

The Interview

1. What inspired you to write poetry?

‘The poem is the cry of its occasion.’

2. Who introduced you to poetry?

Mine was not a literary youth. My poetic beginnings date from my time at university in Dublin, where I had not one but three very talented contemporaries to learn from. I would most likely not have amounted to anything, insofar as I have amounted to anything, without that intensely formative stage in my writing life.

3. How aware were you of the dominating presence of older poets?

Dublin is a city full of statues, at least some of which were still walking the streets when I was young. What a strange experience to find oneself falling into step on Baggot Street with Michael Hartnett and to strike up a casual conversation with him about Irish bardic poetry. There was a lot of that about.

4. What is your daily writing routine?

I have a demanding day-job and a toddler round the place, so I can’t say I have a fixed daily writing routine. I walk around with bits of paper stuffed in my pockets and scribble on them between classes or in cafes, then scrape the results together late at night. It seems to work.

5. What motivates you to write?

The usual farrago of boredom, horror, joy, gratitude, and other assorted emotional stopping-off points along that spectrum.

6. What is your work ethic?

In need of a stern talking-to.

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

I notice Dublin bookseller price tags on the WS Graham and Marianne Moore Collected Poems I was reading just today, so the connection to the world of my student reading remains very strong, yes.

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

I was terribly upset by Roy Fisher’s death last year. I credit him with the great leap forward my imagination took in my thirties, which helped me move away from the callow juvenilia I’d been writing up until then. His work is a great flaming furnace moulding the genius loci of Albion into those incomparable ingots of his long poems, from City to ‘Wonders of Obligation’ and beyond.

9. Why do you write?

Can’t honestly say. Maybe best not to know. Keeps me off the streets.

10. What would you say to someone who asked you “How do you become a writer?”
Poetry is modified breathing. You’re already halfway there. On you go then.

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

I am grappling with a long poem which will be mainly about channelling the buried psychic energies of the kingdom of Pictland, where I live (Aberdeenshire), via its symbol stones and stone circles, and on completion of which I expect an ancient Celtic serpent god to be reanimated and assume his place as our rightful overlord.

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 two options: an emailed list of questions or a more fluid interview via messenger.
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.

Michael Forester

“There is one journey. We commence it the moment we enter the world, and complete it the moment we leave. Its purpose is to learn, to love and to grow.” So starts Michael Forester’s latest book, One Journey: A Travelogue of Awakening.

Michael is 62 years old. He lives between the southern edge of the New Forest and the sea, with his hearing dog, Matt, for Michael is close to being profoundly deaf. He is a full time author and public speaker, travelling both in the UK and internationally, speaking inspirationally and signing his books for readers in locations as far apart as the UK, Thailand and the Philippines.

On graduating from Oxford University in 1977, Michael first taught economics, before spending over thirty years in the world of business consultancy and management.

In 2015, he made a fundamental change himself, leaving management to concentrate full time on creative writing and public speaking. He is the author of nine published books to date, on subjects as diverse as business strategy, spiritual inspiration and epic fantasy poetry.

Michael’s own journey has taken him from early years in academia into middle years in management consultancy, management training and Neuro Linguistic Programming.

It has taken him from normal hearing to near-profound deafness and, in 2004, the life-changing arrival of a hearing dog, Matt.

It has taken him through a miraculously survived suicide attempt in 2002, into a spiritual awakening.

He has travelled around the planet to over forty countries, from the Amazon Rainforest, encountering ecological devastation, to South Africa, experiencing post-Apartheid forgiveness; from a personal pilgrimage in search of the singing bowls of Nepal, to a first-hand examination of the darker side of economic modernisation in the Philippines, besides many other destinations.

His books can be found at his website, http://www.michaelforester.co.uk

Website is
michaelforester.co.uk

Link to the books is
michaelforester.co.uk/books

Amazon link for my new book is

The Interview

1. When and why did you begin to write poetry?

I started in the millennium year. It was a reaction to an enormous emotional trauma that resulted in an emotional breakdown
1.1 How did you know poetry could help you through this?

It wasn’t that I thought poetry would help, it was that I felt driven inside as everything external felt dangerous. Writing became my whole life. My intention was to write a series of short stories at that time. One that I started simply came out in poetic form quite unexpectedly and I was left with a 3000 word fantasy poem.

I was really pleased with it, but even in a matter of days I had realised I was far from finished. I spent the rest of the summer focused on extending it and ended up with 32,000 word work of rhyming verse in 16th century English. This later became my epic fantasy poem Dragonsong

2. Who introduced you to poetry?

like everyone else I studied some poetry at school. But I have to be honest and say I don’t think I had read any more from that time until I wrote Dragonsong

Nevertheless, I remain grateful to my English literature teacher from A-level studies who introduced me to the romantics who have remained a considerable favourite of mine even now and to a teacher some years before that when I was about 12 or 13 years old who introduced me to modern poetry, modern in those days being WH Auden, Stephen Spender etc

I had a very religious upbringing! I had read the King James Bible in its entirety the age of 12 and again by the time I was 18. Language land at that age never really leaves you.
3. How aware are you of the dominating presence of older poets traditional and contemporary?

I will take my single greatest poetic influence is TS Eliot

I also read Charles Bukowski avidly.

As to the modern poetry scene, I largely avoided due to its generally in tolerant attitude to traditional form, which is where I work best

3.1. Why do you feel at home in traditional form?

It’s a very interesting question. It’s not that I do not write unstructured poetry. I have written quite a lot. However I commonly gravitate to rhyming verse with a particular emphasis on cadence which powerfully supports spoken poetry which I guess is my greatest interest. As to why that feels like home I think it’s the regularity of the metre and the structural attraction to making verse scan – so a pure linguist attraction I think

3.2 More song like? Extrapolating on your title “Dragonsong”.

Actually, I have tried to write songs but I’m not very good at it! I’m deaf and the lack of ability to hear music is probably behind that.

3.3 As a deaf person what is the appeal of spoken poetry?

I began going deaf from the age of 30.
It is not affected my speech materially. I’m regarded as a mesmeric public speaker. People particularly enjoyed the sound of my voice.

Being deaf, when I take questions from the floor I have to have someone stand next to me to tell me what those questions hour. On the stage it’s mostly me talking to an audience which removes the problem of hearing

3.4 What appeals to you about Buk’s poetry?

It’s grittiness, earthiness and unrestrained honesty Combined with a tremendously powerful use of words

4. What is your daily writing routine?

Intriguingly, I don’t have one! I’m aware of the philosophy that says one must write every day but I don’t subscribe to it. Instead, I seek inspiration by walking in The New Forest where I live. Sometimes it results in poetry, sometimes short stories, sometimes I’m working on a much larger venture. As regards poetry in particular I need to be moved emotionally to write. That could mean anything from being in love to becoming angry at developments on the world seen. I have written much political poetry in anger and abuse of one sort or another. It therefore comes when it comes and can’t be constrained to a schedule

5. How do the writers you read when you were young influence you today?

I think it soaks into the skin at an early age. When I was on tour in the Philippines last year I had cause to refer back to John Keats Ode on a Grecian Urn.
I was astonished on reading it which I had not done for 30 years or more defined have similarly expressed himself to me. It was like he was speaking to me personally across two centuries.
It became the subject of more than one seminar I delivered in universities in Manila.
6. You said earlier you’d largely avoided modern poets, so who of today’s writers do you admire the most and why?

There are several novelists I admire greatly and read regularly such as Salman Rushdie, Yann Martel, Kazuo Ishiguro. It’s harder to identify poets on the current scene who are at the same level. I find myself thinking of musicians such as Bob Dylan or Paul Simon. Apologies I don’t mean any offence to other poets. I’m just not drawn to their work.

There are several novelists I admire greatly and read regularly such as Salman Rushdie, Yann Martel, Kazuo Ishiguro. It’s harder to identify poets on the current scene who are at the same level. I find myself thinking of musicians such as Bob Dylan or Paul Simon. Apologies I don’t mean any offence to other poets. I’m just not drawn to their work

7. Why do write?

Would it be trite to say because I can’t stop?
I’ve reached the point now where I have a significant number of followers both in the UK and internationally. I believe I making a contribution based at the literary level and spiritually. Both are fundamentally important to me. As long as I believe I’m doing something useful I am highly motivated to continue.

There are several novelists I admire greatly and read regularly such as Salman Rushdie, Yann Martel, Kazuo Ishiguro. It’s harder to identify poets on the current scene who are at the same level. I find myself thinking of musicians such as Bob Dylan or Paul Simon. Apologies I don’t mean any offence to other poets. I’m just not drawn to their work

7.1 Spiritually?

I write mindbody spirit works as well as fiction and poetry.

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

My newest release is a book called One journey: a travel log of awakening. It explores the connection between the places to which we travel and the people we become.

It’s a question I am asked all the time on tour. I believe that authors have to find their unique authentic voice. In my opinion this can only be done by shutting out all the noise that we listen to all day long and going inside, by meditation, by walking in nature, by listening to inspirational music, and so on to find that unique voice. When you have found it, respect it. Don’t dismiss what comes to you because you think it will be rejected. It’s vital to work with it and develop what comes even if it never gets read by somebody else. This is where authenticity starts and new writers are made.

9. You spoke of your newest release tell me about the writing projects you have on at the moment.

My new book one journey has only been out a matter of days and I’m now in the promotional phase intensively. I think this will probably preoccupy me until the end of this year.
There are several places I might go next year. One is the completion of the third volume of my trilogy that starts with my book Vicious: a novel of punk rock and the second coming.
Another is another non-fiction book I’m working on to do with homelessness

 

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 two options: an emailed list of questions or a more fluid interview via messenger.
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.

Phil Knight

is a poet from Neath in South Wales. He has been published in ‘Red Poets’, ‘South’, ‘Earthlove’, ‘Poetry Wales’, ‘Dail 174’, ‘Planet’, ‘The Journal’ and many other publications. He has brought out three collections of poetry; ‘The Old Bolsheviks’ (Green Arrow 2011), ‘Dylanation’ (Green Arrow 2014) and ‘You  Are Welcome To Wales’ (Red Poets 2015). Phil is the Chairperson of Neath Writers Group and he is a member of the Cheval Trust which runs the Terry Hetherington Young Writers Awardhttps://chevalwriters.org.uk/index-m.html Phil is a regular reader with the Red Poets and he is MC of Neath  Poems And Pints (7:30pm first Thursday of the Month at the Cambrian Arms, Melyn, Neath) which rises funds for the Terry Hetherington Young Writers Award.

The Interview
1. What inspired you to write poetry?
I caught the poetry bug back in 1995 during the Year of Literature Festival in Swansea, I saw the amazing Adrain Mitchell reading his poems and I was blown away. It was the way he connected with his audience and he put into words what he were all feeling. That is great Poetry. That inspired me to try and write poetry.

2. Who introduced you to poetry?
I joined Neath Writers Group and I did number of courses through Swansea University’s DACE program. The poet and playwright Peter Thabit Jones was just one of the brilliant teachers I had . But I believe a poet never stops learning.

3. How aware were you of the dominating presence of older poets?
As we as Adrian Mitchell I also had the privilege of hearing two great Welsh poets read their work. Terry Hetherington and Nigel Jenkins both had wonderful deep, rich voices. I also bought their books and still read them decades later. Terry and Nigel were both very encouraging to new writers.

4. What is your daily writing routine?
Try to write something every day, even if it just a note, an email or a comment on social media, it keeps the writing muscle going. You never can tell what will grow into a poem.

5. What motivates you to write?
Injustice, war, poverty, the weather, Wales, the splendid beauty of the Vale of Neath. It can be anything. I try to be open to the universe.

6. What is your work ethic?
If I thought of writing as work I would not do it. I write because I enjoy it and makes me happy. If it was work it would make me feel a slave. I write because I want to, and sometimes because I feel I must.

7. How do the writers you read when you were young influence you today?
I love Dylan Thomas, to me he is the Master. But I hate the whole “let’s put the drunk ahead of the poet” Dylan Thomas industry and that was the subject of my second poetry collection “Dylanation”. Harri Webb, Idris Davies, Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas and Siegfried Sassoon are among the poets I return to again and again. But the influence is more through their passion for words, and not trying to write like them. Too many poets now are over influenced by their teachers and that is why a flat American style of dull unengaged free verse is so wide spread, because that is the house style of many university courses. A poet should write in their own voice.

8. Who of today’s writers do you admire the most
and why?
Mike Jenkins, the editor of Red Poets Magazine and Tim Richards who published my first poem in “Y Fanner Goch”, have been been important influences on my own writing. In that they both write about Wales and their home towns and their set their poems against the backdrop of the real world, with its pain and passions. Among living writers I enjoy are Paul Henry, Christine Thatcher, Huw Pudner, and many others.

1. Why do you write?
Because I must.

2. What would you say to someone who asked you “How do you become a writer?”
Write for yourself, write if it wants you happy, if it does not what’s the point.

1. Tell me about the writing projects you have on at the moment.
Just take each day as it comes and write if I feel like.

Bio
Phil Knight is a poet from Neath in South Wales. He has been published in ‘Red Poets’, ‘South’, ‘Earthlove’, ‘Poetry Wales’, ‘Dail 174’, ‘Planet’, ‘The Journal’ and many other publications. He has brought out three collections of poetry; ‘The Old Bolsheviks’ (Green Arrow 2011), ‘Dylanation’ (Green Arrow 2014) and ‘You Are Welcome To Wales’ (Red Poets 2015). Phil is the Chairperson of Neath Writers Group and he is a member of the Cheval Trust which runs the Terry Hetherington Young Writers Awardhttps://chevalwriters.org.uk/index-m.html Phil is a regular reader with the Red Poets and he is MC of Neath Poems And Pints (7:30pm first Thursday of the Month at the Cambrian Arms, Melyn, Neath) which rises funds for the Terry Hetherington Young Writers Award.

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 two options: an emailed list of questions or a more fluid interview via messenger.
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.

Tom Montag

is the author of several books of poetry, including In This Place: Selected Poems 1982-2013, Imagination’s Place: The Old Poet Poems, The Miles No One Wants, The Big Book of Ben Zen, and Middle Ground, as well as several books of prose, including Curlew: Home, Kissing Poetry’s Sister, and The Idea of the Local. He teaches both creative nonfiction and poetry for The Mill: A Place for Writers in Appleton, Wisconsin. During the 1970s, he edited Margins: A Review of Little Magazines and Small Press Books and was a Founding Contributing Editor for The Pushcart Prize. He has been a featured poet at Atticus Review and Contemporary American Voices, with other poems published in a variety of literary magazines, including Blue Heron Review, Hamilton Stone Review, The Homestead Review, Little Patuxent Review, Mud Season Review, Poetry Quarterly, Provo Canyon Review, and Third Wednesday. With David Graham he is editing an anthology of poetry about small towns. His poem “Lecturing My Daughter in Her First Fall Rain” has been incorporated into the permanent design of Milwaukee’s Convention Center, along with the work of Lorine Niedecker and other Wisconsin writers.

Here is the link for my blog, The Middlewesterner: http://www.middlewesterner.com/

The Interview

1. What inspired you  to write poetry?

I think we have essential moments in our lives which shape us forever. I grew up on an Iowa farm. We had hog chores west of the grove, and towards evening I’d walk through the long shadows out to those hogs and see the sun at the edge of the western horizon. There was longing and loneliness in that moment, seeing the far horizon. I suppose wanting to touch that far horizon is what inspired me, and still inspires me, and wanting to get beyond longing and loneliness. I say this even as I had the best parents and family imaginable. I was strangely bent to feel a kind of loneliness in a home filled with love, I know, but that is how poets are formed, or at least how this poet was formed.

2. Who introduced you to poetry?

I was a poet before anyone introduced me to poetry, I think. I am self-taught. When I was in sixth grade, I suppose it was, one of my Christmas presents from my parents was a leather-bound notebook. I hadn’t really written anything yet. How did they know I needed something like that? We were studying Whittier’s “Snow-Bound” in school that winter. Then we had a terrible blizzard. I wrote a 27 page “Snow-Bound” of my own in that notebook: I have a clear memory of being up in the bedroom I shared with my brother working on the poem, the white light coming in off the snowstorm nearly blinding me. Fortunately, that poem has been lost. Yet the need to write continued. The next poem I remember, another one of those special moments which changes us, came when I was thirteen or fourteen. There was longing and loneliness, an imagined cliff, the edge of the sea below, a lone seagull, waves rolling in, the end of the world. Teen anguish, I suppose. By the time I finished high school, the people around me knew that I was a poet. My senior high school English teacher, Colin Kahl, was always supportive of the strange farm kid who thought he might be a poet and he was, perhaps,  the first to steer me along the path. The poet Sister Therese Lentfoehr helped me further along when I was in college. John Judson showed me how to be true to myself as a poet. Chris Halla put the fire back in me when I was ready to give up.

3. How aware were you of the dominating presence of older poets?

I was a sophomore or junior when Robert Bly came to read at the small college I attended, in 1968 or so. His presence was overpowering. That reading convinced me that I couldn’t read Robert Bly: if I did, I would never become my own poet, I would be a mere Bly imitator. So it wasn’t until I was in my 60s that I started to read him. Rather than overpowering me, at this point, he is more like an old Norwegian bachelor farmer you tolerate because he’s family.
The poets I took as my models were probably William Carlos Williams, Robert Creeley (and with him, a little influence from the open field poetics of Charles Olson), and Nebraska poet William Kloefkorn. I learned from all of them. I didn’t study poetry formally, but let them show me what a poem should look like. Apparently, William Carlos Williams is still an influence: not long ago I received a rejection from an editor who said he had “seen enough of little WC Williams’ poems” and didn’t need to see any more. I have to say these poets taught me that clarity and mystery can cohabit, as did Chinese and Japanese poetry when I discovered it. Ah, clarity. I also had an editor reject my poems because “we like to see more layers than this.”

4. What is your daily writing routine?

Routine? Routine? Hey, I’m a poet. What is this routine of which you speak?
I know I should be telling people they need to make time and space to write every day. Yet, now that I am retired, what I do make time and space for every day, actually, is reading poetry. Reading poetry allows me to compose myself. Sometimes, as a result, poems will come to me as I sit there, having put the book down and lifted my eyes. However, you cannot ask for grace; if it comes, it comes. You can’t force it. This is where I would disagree with William Stafford, who insisted on writing every day and lowering your standards if you had to.
And, to be truthful, my most productive time for poetry is when I am traveling. Something about movement and the motion of the car and the endless scroll of world before me allows the poems to come loose. If taken to court, I would have to say, “No, your honor, I was not writing while I was driving. I was driving while I was writing.” In May and June this past year, I spent a month on the road, heading south to New Orleans, west to Los Angeles, north to Portland, and home from there. About 6500 miles. I call it my Gypsy Poet Tour. It resulted in 579 poems, or little notes for poems. In January, 2016, I spent a couple weeks traveling in New Mexico, and that resulted in about 350 little poems. Again, you can’t force it. You can’t go out expecting a poem every 11.2 miles. You just have to let go, and they will come.
The other thing to note, perhaps, is that I might not be a good writer, but I am a terrific reviser. Many of my poems start as “notes for poems.” Many others go into my “compost heap,” to be brought out and re-worked later. And some of them, yes, never make it out of the compost heap. That’s part of the process — not being afraid to fail.

5. What motivates you to write?

Longing. Love. Loss. A need to chew the language. A need to express what the world is trying to say. This question is like asking: what motivates you to breathe. You do it if you want to live.

6. What is your work ethic?

I might be the laziest poet you’ll interview. I don’t have a work ethic. I just do what I do, and have been blessed that my lackadaisical approach works for me. I will say, however, if I go several days without writing, you’ll see me get in the car and go for a drive. There will be a red-tail hawk somewhere waiting to break loose a poem for me.
If I haven’t been writing, I tend to get a little cranky, as if the lack of poems is an irritant. Then, as I say, I go for a drive to unblock whatever is stuck in me.

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

Because I am self-taught, the poets I chose as “models” influence that shape of how I think a poem should look. I tend to write shorter poems, rather than longer ones. I tend to write shorter lines rather than longer ones. I tend to leave in a lot of air in my poetry, a lot of light. I tend to use the “American idiom” of Williams and Creeley. I heard a nationally-recognized poet read in Milwaukee fifteen years ago, and afterwards noted to a friend that I’ve never used in my poems any of the nouns and verbs he used in his. It was such a stark contrast, and a revealing moment for me; I was not that kind of poet, and I did not want to be that kind of poet. For instance, I have never used the word “plastic” in a poem, since plastic and poetry so seldom overlap.
Basho’s poem about the frog jumping into the water has become for me a metaphor for what a poem should do: in every poem, the frog has to jump. There should be a leap. Of course, I can say that because I write lyric poetry, rather than narrative poetry, philosophical poetry, or didactic poetry.
I might use a big word like “beauty” in a poem, but it will still have its roots attached, and dirt on it. WC Williams said, “No ideas but in things,” and the Oriental poets I’ve read taught me to let the things of this world shine from within.
Some might say they write to express their feelings. I write to express not what I have to say, but what the world has to say. Some say you have to think of the reader when you write; I do not think of the reader, I think of what the poem wants.
Jack Spicer suggested that poets are radios, picking up whatever is coming across on the ether. There’s some truth in that.
I also like to tell people that if I couldn’t read upside-down, if I didn’t eavesdrop shamelessly, and if I didn’t hear voices, I would have very little to write about.
I heard Robert Creeley tell a story about a poet who gave a reading at a middlewestern college some years ago and afterwards was asked “Was that a real poem, or did you just make it up?” I write real poems; I don’t make them up. With my poem about trees marching across the hillside, I could show you those trees. My poems with Mile Markers in the titles were written at those locations. Go there, and you can see the world of which the poem speaks.

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

Jane Kenyon, Sharon Olds, Linda Pastan, Linda Gregg, Linda Gregerson, Jane Hirshfield, and Joan Kane, for starters. Why? Because they tell the truth.

9. Why do you write?

It should be obvious by now that I write for the same reason I breathe; it is something beyond my control.

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

I would say you learn to write poetry by reading poetry and writing poetry. Read ten thousand poems. Write two hundred poems. You are now ready to begin.
I would say keep putting one word after another.
I would say don’t give up.
I would say don’t let the bastards get you down.
The best predictor of which young poet will stay at it is not who is the most ambitious, nor who has the most talent. The best predictor is who is the most stubborn. There’s no money in this, and you’d be a fool to think there is, so you’re doing it because you can’t do otherwise.

How do you become a writer?

You become a writer by writing. Just do it.

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

I have a collection together for publication sometime in the next year entitled Seventy at Seventy, seventy poems written at age seventy.
I am co-editing an anthology of poetry about small towns.
I have a boxful of poems in the voice of a gnarly “Old Poet” which needs to be sorted out.
I have to ask myself what I’m going to do with the 350 poems in my Notebook: New Mexico and the 579 poems in Gypsy Poet Tour. Some of these can be seen on my blog, The Middlewesterner and on my Facebook page. Some of the New Mexico poems are available as an e-book titled The Miles No One Wants.
These past years, I have been writing poems faster than I can type them up, and it is starting to be time to look at those boxes of neglected first drafts and see what I’ve got.
I have never had a writer’s residency/retreat before, and next week I will spend a week with several other writers on a ranch along the Keya Paha River in north central Nebraska. What will come of that? I don’t know.

What writing projects do I have on, you ask?

I don’t have time for writing projects. I’m busy being a poet.

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 two options: an emailed list of questions or a more fluid interview via messenger.
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.

Penelope Shuttle

has lived in Cornwall since 1970, is the widow of the poet Peter Redgrove, and has a grown-up daughter Zoe, who works at the University of Bristol. Her first collection of poems, The Orchard Upstairs (1981) was followed by six other books from Oxford University Press, The Child-Stealer (1983), The Lion from Rio (1986), Adventures with My Horse (1988), Taxing the Rain (1994), Building a City for Jamie (1996) and Selected Poems 1980-1996 (1998), and then A Leaf Out of His Book (1999) from Oxford Poets/Carcanet, and Redgrove’s Wife (2006) and Sandgrain and Hourglass (2010) from Bloodaxe Books. Redgrove’s Wife was shortlisted for both the Forward Prize and the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2006. Sandgrain and Hourglass was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Her retrospective, Unsent: New & Selected Poems 1980-2012 (Bloodaxe Books, 2012), drew on ten collections published over three decades plus the title-collection, Unsent. A new collection, Will You Walk a Little Faster?, was published by Bloodaxe on Penelope Shuttle’s 70th birthday in May 2017. Heath, a collaboration about Hounslow Heath with John Greening, was published by Nine Arches in 2016. First published as a novelist, her fiction includes All the Usual Hours of Sleeping (1969), Wailing Monkey Embracing a Tree (1973) and Rainsplitter in the Zodiac Garden (1977). With Peter Redgrove, she is co-author of The Wise Wound: Menstruation and Everywoman (1978) and Alchemy for Women: Personal Transformation Through Dreams and the Female Cycle (1995), as well as a collection of poems, The Hermaphrodite Album (1973), and two novels, The Terrors of Dr Treviles: A Romance (1974) and The Glass Cottage: A Nautical Romance (1976). Shuttle’s work is widely anthologised and can be heard on The Poetry Archive Website. Her poetry has been broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and 4, and her poem ‘Outgrown’ was used in a radio and television commercial. She has been a judge for many poetry competitions, is a Hawthornden Fellow, and a tutor for the Poetry School. She is current President of the Falmouth Poetry Group, one of the longest-running poetry workshops in the country.

The Interview

1. When and why did you start to write poetry?

I started to write at a very early age, possibly in the womb.  I was drawn to print as a tiny child, and like loads of writers I spoke early and I read before I was three.  So the world was a place I encountered verbally, that was how I experienced everything, joys and pain.  But I started to write seriously when I was twelve, poetry and fiction. I always thought I was fourteen but recently in conversation with my very alert 97 years old mum she told me I was twelve.  By the age of fifteen I was sending poems out to little magazines, Melody, Poetmeat, and other poetry magazines of the 60s.  I wrote because I wrote.  And I was and am a voracious reader.

2. Did you introduce yourself to poetry?

My first love, when very young, was reading fiction, and I went to the public library a lot. I read historical fiction and the classics and the contemporary fiction of the day.
I spent a lot of time at my grandfather’s house (the house I was born in ) and my late grandmother had loved reading, and in that house I found some old poetry anthologies of hers, and I remember reading (and not understanding a word) of an extract from Keats’ ‘Hyperion’, when I was about eleven.  But what I got from that extract was a sense of a magical and tangible world, rich and sensuous, full of light and colour, and I drew from the energy of those (to me) curious lines.  It doesn’t matter if we don’t ‘understand’ the poem, it is the extent of our response and where the poem takes us that is the true reading.  After this lovely threshold reading of Keats, I found H R Munro’s Overheard on a Saltmarsh’, with its goblin, its green bead necklace, and its refrain.  It begins like this –

Nymph, nymph, what are your beads?

Green glass, goblin. Why do you stare at them?

Give them me.
No.

Give them me. Give them me.
No.

Then I will howl all night in the reeds,
Lie in the mud and howl for them.

Goblin, why do you love them so?

And again the magic, the strange otherworldliness of the lines, the sense (as I later found in reading Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto) that there is another world but it is this one, all this drew me deeper into poetry, and then I read loads, and when very young I preferred anthologies, where there was a wide range of different voices to explore.  I remember being very struck, in my early teens, by a poem by Robert Graves, published in The Listener (I think), called ‘Turn of the Moon’, which begins with an image of the full moon bringing water to the world ‘in a goatskin bag’.  So I always liked magic, positive strangeness, this world renewed by a shift in perspective taking us out of the quotidian into deeper richer places.  So I suppose in a way poetry introduced itself to me.  Hello, I’m Poetry, who are you?
In my late teens the soi-disant ‘Movement’ poets, androcentric, dull, full of the gentility principle, made me doubt that poetry was for me, though.  I was rescued from this sense of sterility by the happy discovery on a bookstall in Charing Cross Road of an early Selected Poems by Denise Levertov, and that wondrous book gave me permission to go on writing and building my own voice.  And Levertov is an abiding influence on my own writing.

3. What is your daily writing routine?

I write in the mornings, but my mornings last until 2.30 mostly, after that I don’t feel I have the edge for writing.  But  the work involves a real mix  – of new drafts, editing and revising older drafts, going back to look at poems I’ve set aside to incubate (and this can be for months or on occasion a couple of years).  My reading takes place around the edges of all this, and then in the late afternoon and evenings I’ll read.  By the evening I’ll have gone on to novel reading.  I’ll have a walk in the afternoon and I’ll be thinking about the on-going poem in an atmospheric sort of way, though sometimes a line will resolve, or a new  line will occur to me, or I can see the poem in my head and make some cuts. I always have a notebook with me, and so will scribble things down.  I’m a big believer in Frances Bacon’s ‘organised chaos’, and I’m often working on parallel projects, or old poems alongside brand-new ones.  I’ve been fortunate enough recently to be part of two collaborative projects, first on ‘Heath’ with John Greening, and now on ‘Lzrd’, poems inspired by the Lizard Peninsula in Cornwall, co-written with Alyson Hallett.  It is a very different focus, the process of collaboration, and I find it very refreshing as it gets me away from my own poems for a spell, and then I go back to that work with new eyes and new senses.  It is a hard thing to map out, though, the way in which I work, and it is more like spinning a web or weaving a tapestry in a way, stitch by stitch, and sometimes the necessary writing or weaving happens in the middle of the night, or on a train, or in a supermarket.  I think poets are always tuning in via their antennae to the world around them, and so the boundary between ‘I am working’ and ‘I am in a reverie’ is quite blurred, and productively so, for me.  Of course the later stages of editing and preparing a poem to send out to a magazine, or preparing a collection, require a forensic attention, a much-more structured approach, and that is always exciting and terrifying.  But why else do we do it?

And of course interspersed with all the above are the acres of time spent on admin, emails, organising events, travel, keeping in touch with social media, all the nuts and bolts of life. We are powering towards our third Cornwall Contemporary Poetry Festival (22/25th November, Falmouth Hotel, Falmouth) and though I do far less work than my festival committee colleagues, it still takes up time (but in a good cause, of course).

4. How do the writers you read when you were young influence you today?

I think that the writers who were Important  to me when I was young have just bedded down into my sensibilities, and influence me to this day by their abiding presence. Denise Levertov, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Ahkmatova, Rilke are poets I return to, and their daring, craft and emotional control and richness of range continue to give me permission to explore my own articulation.  I must also add Wallace Stevens and Pasternak.  When I was a young woman the English contemporary poets were not very interesting to me and so I was drawn to poets in translation and to US poets. I was hugely influenced by the Penguin European Poets series. In the dry UK field of poets of the very early 70s these were oases indeed.  I discovered Celan, Nellie Sachs, Yevtushenko, and so many more.

When young, the one voice in contemporary  British poetry that spoke to me significantly was Stevie Smith, her wry mode and deceptively casual address gave me a way forward in my own writing. I love her River God poem! And I now recall a little anthology called 18 European Poets, edited by Danny Abse, published by Pocket Poets, and this was my first introduction to European Poets (this must have been in around 1965).  Here I first read Lorca, ‘Green o green, I want you, green…’ This line from his Romance Sonambulo has haunted me ever since.  It was in this gem of my an anthology that I first read Celan (Black Milk), Pasternak and, I think, Tsvetaeva.  She was also a huge influence on me when Elaine Feinstein’s ground-breaking translations appeared in the 80s

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

I admire so many current poets and am constantly struck by the power and originality of exciting new voices alongside those who began publishing in the 90s or later. I’m  currently re-reading Esther Morgan’s tenderly elegiac and familial new collection, The Wound Register.  Many of my own contemporaries unfailingly surprise, delight and intrigue me.  Too many to name, so I am going to focus on two writers  I am currently steeped in. Firstly, States of Happiness, by Suzanne Batty. Now I have to say that I mentored Suzanne during part of the writing of this, her second Bloodaxe collection, but from the moment I chose her poems as winner of the inaugural Ann Born Prize, I have valued her poems very highly, and have learned a great deal in connection with my own writing via the energy and courage of Suzanne’s poems, her richly memoried and transactional art of writing. Such work unlocks the imaginal in my own writing. The second writer who has all my attention right now is the late Australian prose writer, Beverly Farmer.   Her writing is lyric, oceanic, gathered, compelling. I have only recently discovered her through her last work, Of Water (five connected stories). I read a lot of prose writers,  they nourish my poetry. Farmer’s work flows beyond the borders of prose or poetry, and her insights, imagery and psychological discernment are beyond praise. Finding her books has been like finding a new way of being, of living.  That is what great writing can do.

Writers I like, and why:

Gillian Allnutt, Pascale Petit, Jane Draycott, Suzanne Batty, Jo Shapcott, Jane Yeh, Alice Oswold, Sinead Morrissey,  Mark Waldron, Paula Meehan…

I love the poetry and novels of Canadian writer Anne Michaels.
I admire Mark Goodwin’s work, with its innovation and its original focus on landscape. Mark is a walker and a climber and so his engagement with the physical landscape is experienced, is up close and personal.
Why do I love the work of these writers?  Their work gives me a very necessary sense of connection with the real in all its infinite manifestations, and connects me to the tested and active purpose of the imagination.  Their work is exciting, renews my faith in language, illuminates my darker times so I can find my way through.  I learn from them, and their writing gives me pleasure and energy.
Adrienne Rich has a wonderful description of the way in which the poems communicate with us –

‘how we hear rain on the roof or music on the radio upstairs, how we meet or avoid the eye of a neighbour or a stranger…That pressure bends our angle of vision whether we recognize it or not…When poetry lays its hand on our shoulder we are, to an almost physical degree, touched and moved…’

The poets I’ve listed above, and so many more, do this!

6. Why do you write?

Why do I write?

It’s my life, it’s how I experience the world, how I try to comprehend it.;  Poems are like time-machines, they take us back to significant events and places in our life, so we can always revisit.  Writing is a way of coping with loss and bereavement.  I also write to inhabit the present and think about the future.  I write, in the words of HD, ‘to make real to myself what is most real.’  I write because I love language, its play, its stringency, its power.  I write because I can’t not write.  Writing is exciting and transformative.  D. H. Lawrence said of writing that if it isn’t fun then don’t do it.  And I love this quote from Czeslaw Milosz – The poet is like a mouse in an enormous cheese excited by how much cheese there is to eat.

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

Read, and read.  Read the new poetry books, but also read back through time..  Perhaps use the technique employed by Inua Ellams in his collection Afterwords (Nine Arches).  Inua Ellams was poet in residence at the Poetry Library at the Southbank Centre in London, and he drew on the library’s comprehensive book collection, following his own life story from the year of his childhood to his eighteenth year by selecting poems published during each year of his birth.  He then wrote response poems to these poems.  This is close-reading of a profound nature; anyone following this technique or finding a version of this practice will have gained a formidable structure to their reading, benefiting their own writing and knowledge of contemporary poetry over whatever time frame is chosen.

Read the canon, T S Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, Denise Levertov,   Read the classics.  Read new and old translations of Homer, of poets outside the Anglophone sphere.  And read poems aloud, to get a fuller sense of the structure, purpose and pace of a poem.

You might try choosing a favourite poet, and reading all of her or his work, and associated reviews, essays on that poet.  This kind of close scrutiny is invaluable.  I know of one poet who chooses a different poet each week, and reads that poet intensively for that week.

You will almost inevitably be short of time, but try to ring-fence an hour, or even half an hour a day, and just write, without editing, without thinking I must write a poem that will be accepted by a magazine.  Write for the pleasure of writing, for the experience of learning by doing what it is to write.  Perhaps go online to find a series of prompts, if you are getting stuck for something to write about.  It is often productive to put poems away for a month, or three months, to allow them to incubate, and then when you return to the drafts the deadwood will fall away, and the poetry that is alive and working will reveal itself.

If there is a local Poetry Stanza within reach, or any kind of critiquing or poetry appreciation group,  join it.  This will avoid the problem of isolation, because although there are contacts and much to be gained by finding writers and writing groups online, it is still an isolation.  Real people in the real world are essential to a writer, and learning how to accept criticism of your drafts, and learning how to edit and critique by focusing on the work of other developing or established poets is vital.

Look online at what the Poetry School offer, there are courses online, and at various venues in London and through the UK.  They also have a list of poets who offer mentor sessions.

Read your own poems aloud when they are in draft form.  Is there one line you stumble over?  Ask yourself why, and work to make that line or stanza clearer, more fluid, maybe by cutting back, maybe by expanding.  In writing poetry we learn by doing, by our mistakes, by our willingness to see our work as always in progress, open to change and re-consideration.

Try to go to readings, or even to Festivals if your budget allows.

Go, if you can, to the Poetry Library at the Southbank, or to the Scottish Poetry Library.  Order books from your local library.

Go to the Poetry Archive, and listen to as many poets as you can.

Believe in your writing, believe that the page belongs to you, but accept criticism, be open.  Be aware that finding your voice as a poet is a long process, and one that is constantly shifting and renewing.

Join the Poetry Society.  If you are on a tight budget try to find a poet friend to share the subscription.

8. Tell me about any writing projects your involved in at the moment.

I’m quite prolific, I think, and often have several projects on the go, working on them turn and turn about.

Since 2015 I’ve been working on a full-length collection of poems titled Lyonesse.  I am now doing final edits on this. Several Lyonesse poems have appeared in magazines, and four are shortly to appear in a Stickleback pamphlet.

I am also working on a parallel collection, consisting of poems written from 2016 and to which I am adding new poems, titled History of The Child.  The title sequence is a set of 24 poems focusing on childhood, both personal and trans-personal, drawn from memories and mediated by the imaginal. Other poems in the book explore familial issues and include poems considering aspects of the patriarchy via the figures of Lear and Noah.  And there are also poems set outside these frameworks, exploring other themes, including poems respectively on the death of Stanley Spencer, on Rome, Wallace Stevens, Kew Gardens, and Katherine of Aragon.

In August 2016 I challenged myself to attempt the familiar system of writing a poem a day.  I was also influenced in this decision by  the practice of American poet William Stafford who said that he always wrote a poem a day and that it did not matter if it was good or bad.  This was very affirming.  I wrote a poem a day from from August 2016 to February 2017, when I pretty much hit the wall and stopped, though I have added some extra poems when over several days the mood has returned.  These poems are currently put aside in incubation mode and I shall return to them at a future date, when time has de-familiarised them.  In the opening poems of the poem-a-day process I found myself writing journal-type poems about the weather or about what I saw from my window, but as I continued the project the subjects grew deeper and darker, and the entire process was very involving, and led me to avenues I would not have discerned otherwise in my writing.

I am also writing a series of short poems on my phone. I call these ‘Phone Poems’.  I began doing this when I got a new phone this summer, and the first poems are about visiting Reykjavik.

Later this month (October) I’m publishing a collection of poems inspired by the Lizard Peninsula in Cornwall, written in collaboration with my friend and co-poet Alyson Hallett, This book is called Lzrd, and is published by Indigo Dreams Publications.  We’ll be launching it in Falmouth at the Cornwall Contemporary Poetry Festival on the 23rd November.

I’m also looking back over the various short stories I have published over the years.  This is proving a strange and interesting  process, taking me back in writing’s time machine to much earlier modes. I have not written stories for a while but my interest has re-awakened.

I have new poems appearing shortly in Poetry, Ambit, Artemis, and Magma.

And I’m reading as much poetry by a wide range of poets as I can.  As usual.  And in the field of prose writing I am, as I say, reading all the novels and short stories of Australian writer Beverley Farmer.