Lydia Unsworth, Stay Awhile

 

FFS

It’s like, you built this. You don’t just get to say I quit and start again like you’re 77 and can father a new family without consequence any time you feel up to it. You built this and you leave it behind. The guardians say no while you try to cut it out like circles from a tight orange dress. But who listens to a guardian? We’ve got the loud man here. And he’s outwitted us again because in the rules, rules he wrote, it says culture is the hand around the wrist.

The latest from Manchester, England poet Lydia Unsworth is Stay Awhile (Merseyside UK: The Knives Forks and Spoons Press, 2026), a book of buildings and human occupation, construction and how human construction occupies space. Through the poems of Stay Awhile, Unsworth stcutures a book-length suite that examines how building construction shapes the way we interact with each other and our environment, including apartment towers, sculpture and monuments. “no one knows why Intestine City is called Intestine City,” she writes, as part of “Ex Terra Lucem,” a title that translates from Latin into “Light from Earth,” “no one / but people are able to find a tiny piece of glass / from 2,400 years ago and explain it / from the earth comes light / we should not deny it [.]” She writes on connecting human construction to human response and interaction, and into parenting, differentiating the responses between our first-person narrator and her two young children, who regularly appear to provide their own commentary. Through moving across such landscapes, the poems ask: what become our responsbiliities to such spaces, each other and even to ourselves, through such repeated and continuous abandonment? Or, as the poem “You Get Free Parking All Day” offers:

 

 

little trees have been popped at the bases of all the stairwells
so we don’t notice the stairwells and attempt to ascend

they don’t want us to be reminded of what was once
dreamt for the upper level 

we’ve got to ignore the fact that we are all ashamed

Through long stretches of accumulation, Unsworth composes her poems through layerings of narrative shorthand, offering only what is absolutely necessary, that form lyric shapes, turning at times from a kind of music to more direct speech with striking effect. “you can start to appreciate scale // a horse reared / behind a low fence // signs started to imply we shouldn’t be here,” she writes, as part of “Unproductive and Unfunctional Blankness,” “I hate guard dogs / the way they ruin an entire species [.]” Unsworth offers poems that blend description, meditation, prose blocks, line breaks and visual rhythms that cohere into a poetry of subtle but seismic narrative force. “If you don’t like it,” begins the short piece “Middlehaven,” “knock it down. Knock it down again. Just keep knocking it down until you get it right. My child does this with a pack of cards, her hands full of dice. // This is my home. I have bought it and I will keep on buying it.”

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Ian Seed

Ian Seed's recent collections of poetry and prose poetry include Night Window (Shearsman, 2024), Operations of Water (Knives, Forks & Spoons Press, 2020), and New York Hotel (Shearsman, 2018) (a TLS Book of the Year). His most recent translations are The Dice Cup, from the French of Max Jacob (Wakefield Press, 2022), and the river which sleep has told me, from the Italian of Ivano Fermini (Fortnightly Review Odd Volumes, 2022). See www.ianseed.co.uk

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

My first full-length collection was Anonymous Intruder. I was already 52 years old when it was published by Shearsman in January, 2009. Finally I could begin to believe that I was not an imposter after all, and feel much freer to make writing a real commitment.

My more recent work is on the whole based more on narrative, while Anonymous Intruder revolved more around association of images and sounds. Nevertheless, the voices in Anonymous Intruder are spookily similar in some respects to those in my most recent collection, Night Window (January 2024). Perhaps the main difference now (from Makers of Empty Dreams (2014) onwards) is that my writing is much more likely to make you laugh (in the best sense, I hope), while remaining, in the words of Luke Kennard, ‘shot through with melancholy’. 

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

I first came to poetry when I was 17, studying ‘A’-level English. One of our set texts was the Selected Poems of Edward Thomas (1878-1917). I was fascinated and haunted by the melancholy and sense of regret in his poems, as much as I was moved by his observations of nature, his lyricism, and his narratives of encounters. At around the same time, I began to discover that there was a wide and eclectic mix of poetry out there. For example, my aunt had the Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot on her bookshelves, and I remember being drawn especially to ‘The Love Song of Alfred J Prufrock’, while, much more radically, my mother owned a copy of Kenneth Patchen’s Love and War Poems, which is where I discovered prose poems, although I didn’t know the term ‘prose poem’ at that time. Kenneth Patchen’s work was also my first encounter with surrealism. Then there was the Poet Modern Poets series of the 1960s and 70s; I was drawn to the likes of Alan Jackson, Jeff Nuttall and William Wantling in PMT 12, and Charles Bukowski, Philip Lamantia and Harold Norse in PMT 13. I loved the more minor poems of Dylan Thomas, such as ‘To Others Than You’ or ‘Twenty Four Years’ (‘ With my red veins full of money,/ In the final direction of the elementary town / I advance as long as forever is’); I was not so keen on ‘Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night’, which I found (and still do) overly ‘poetic’. Mark Hyatt (1940-72) was a poet who fascinated me; I am so pleased to see his work now, fifty years on, finally getting some of the recognition it deserves, and I have recently reviewed his Selected Poems: So Much for Life (Nightboat Books, 2023) for PN Review. This is all very male and pale, I realise (reflecting what was mainly on offer at the time, even in anthologies such as Michael Horowitz’s Children of Albion: Poetry of the Underground in Britain), but I also loved Sylvia Plath’s Ariel and some poems by Rosemary Tonks that I discovered in an anthology edited by Edward Lucie-Smith. My favourite poems I would copy into an exercise book to carry around with me.

Reading poetry made me want to write. Most of what I wrote was pretty awful, of course, but I got better to the point where an English teacher, David Herbert, who was a poet himself, introduced me to the world of ‘little magazines’ and encouraged me to send some poems off. I would like to say I never looked back, but after having some very minor success with publishing – poems in magazines of the time, two tiny pamphlets published, one self‑published pamphlet featured on local radio (thanks to a contact of David Herbert’s), I more or less stopped writing at the age of 24 and didn’t come back to it in any serious way until two decades later, when I had a kind of mid-life crisis – I am glad that I did. (If you’re interested for more details on my writing journey, see https://fortnightlyreview.co.uk/2022/06/seed-penguin-poets/ , https://fortnightlyreview.co.uk/2018/10/discovery-rediscovery/ and https://ianseed.co.uk/background .)

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

I tend just to ‘turn up for writing’, even if it’s only for a few minutes a day, and then I go from there. Sooner or later, poems or pieces of short prose start coalescing around certain themes, which I may then develop into a collection over a period of around two or three years. I tend to write quickly and quite copiously but around 90% of what I write does not make it into a published piece. Like most writers, I do a lot of editing and simply playing around with language, imagery and narrative. Of course, there are those rare occasions when I get lucky and write something which I suddenly realise reads the way it is meant to be without me messing it up in a second draft.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

Poems usually begin when I go back to all my messing around with words and images, and see if I find something which I can then tease into a poem. I am definitely an author of short pieces that end up combining into something larger. Nevertheless, in spite of the lack of deliberate plotting, my poems and prose poems are usually interlinked in any one collection, and can be read as a kind of continuous story, albeit a fragmented one. Georgia Matthews, reviewing New York Hotel (Shearsman, 2018) for Stride magazine, suggested that readers will find themselves invested in the characters and narratives as they would in a novel. (Perhaps I am really a frustrated novelist at heart!)

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I love doing readings because I can see in real time how people respond to my work. And it’s always good to see a few more books being sold.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

I remember recently coming across an old note written in my early twenties saying that I wrote ‘to create something of beauty and to move people.’ That may sound a bit clumsy and naïve, but I think that even in my youth my ultimate aim was not one of self-expression, but of doing something interesting with language, imagery and narratives, and sometimes rhythm and sound. Which is not to say that there isn’t a lot of self-expression and hidden confession in my writing – there is.

I tend to let my writing pose its own questions without looking for immediate answers; the questions can sometimes be political ones, such as an exploration of our attraction to strongmen (e.g. ‘Tutor’ in New York Hotel), but more often they are a combination of personal, archetypal and aesthetic ones.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

This is a monster of a question, rob, and any answer risks being a portentous one. There are a few writers who are able to capture the spirit of an age or the voice of a generation. Clearly, I am not one of those. In any case, I would not wish to hoist any role onto a writer, though they should take responsibility for what they say and not use language to spread hatred.

I see my own role more to create poem-stories and to take readers into a world which will make people not know if they want to laugh or cry, or both at the same time. As James Tate famously said in an interview with Charles Simic for Paris Review, ‘I love my funny poems, but I’d rather break your heart. And if I can do both in the same poem, that’s the best. If you laughed earlier in the poem, and I bring you close to tears in the end, that’s the best. That’s most rewarding for you and for me too.’

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

It’s always good to get suggestions from an editor. Even if I don’t agree, it will make me go back to my work with fresh eyes. I am grateful to all my editors.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

Turn up for the writing – every day, if you can, but if not, then on a fairly regular basis. It’s easier for poets – we can work in short spurts; much more difficult for a novelist.

Have faith in the poem or story; trust in where it wants to go, not in where you want it to go.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to translation)? What do you see as the appeal?

I see translation as being just as creative as my ‘own’ writing. When I translate poetry into English, I am making something new. The appeal and challenge of translation for me is to create a text which is as true to the spirit and letter of the original as it can be, but also reads naturally in English while at the same time preserving the otherness of the original.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I tend to wake early and just handwrite while lying in bed. I build lots of notes like this to go back to every couple of days – this is where the next stage of writing begins, assuming there is anything in my early morning writing worth taking further; if not, no matter: there will be the next day, or the day after that.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I like to reread authors I find liberating through their use of language, for example John Ashbery, Mark Ford, Sheila E Murphy, Jeremy Over.

Or I will return to authors who may reflect the mood I’m in, such as Lucy Hamilton or Mark Hyatt (both of whose books I have reviewed recently for PN Review). Kenneth Patchen is always good to go back to.

Or I will write reviews – paying attention to another author’s work is enriching and refreshing for my own work.

Or I will cut up an article from a magazine and work with the pieces. The great thing about cutup and collage (although not a technique I use often) is that you never know where it’s going to take you.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

The smell of cat fur. I like to dig my nose into the fur of our ancient cat, just as I did with cats we had when I was a child.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

I think I am still influenced by different British 1960s TV series that I watched as a child, such as The Avengers and The Prisoner: their zaniness, sense of menace, and surreal quality, even if they weren’t strictly surrealist.

I’ve listened to blues, country and rock ‘n’ roll since I was in my teens, and I’ve always had a bit of an obsession with Elvis. This makes its way into my work, for example ‘Country’ in

New York Hotel or ‘In the Anniversary TV Special, the Real’ in Makers of Empty Dreams. For more on Elvis, see https://fortnightlyreview.co.uk/2019/01/building/.

Art also influences my work, and on occasion I have written pieces in response to artists such as Joseph Cornell, Edward Hopper and Giorgio de Chirico.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

So many writers have entered my bloodstream and remained. I will read almost anything and gain something from it. I suppose I am most drawn to ‘outsider’ literature; I read Colin Wilson’s The Outsider when I was in my teens, and that set the terms for much of my initial plunging into the work of authors such as Dostoevsky, Knut Hamsun, W.N.P. Barbellion, Blake and Kafka, especially the latter.

Imagism and Surrealism also helped shape my youthful world outlook, and I think this has very much stayed with me.

In my early twenties, I read authors such as Jean Rhys, Ralph Ellison, Aldous Huxley, James Baldwin, EM Forster and DH Lawrence. Oh, and I loved Anna Kavan’s Ice. Once my Italian was good enough (I worked in Italy for ten years), I got into Dante in quite a big way after reading TS Eliot’s essay on Dante (his own personal favourite among all his essays). I also worked for two years in Paris (teaching English as a Foreign Language), and after around a year, I felt confident enough to read authors such as Ionesco, Gide, Sartre, Patrick Modiano, Simone de Beauvoir, and Annie Ernaux in the original French. And Pierre Reverdy, not imagining that thirty years later I would publish the first translation of Le voleur de Talan into English (see https://wakefieldpress.com/products/the-thief-of-talant ).

And languages are of immense importance to me. I should confess that I am entirely self-taught, and still suffer from imposter syndrome. I picked up Italian, French and Polish by living and working in Italy, France and Poland (though I am rusty in all of them now that I have been living in the UK again for the last twenty or so years). Even my personality will change according to which language I am speaking. When I have the rare opportunity to speak Italian, I feel as if I am my thirty-year-old self again living in Italy.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Learn German well enough to read Kafka in the original. I’ve recently started a beginner’s class.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I only make a partial living as a writer and translator, so I have always had to earn my living in different ways, some more conducive to my character than others. I really just wish I hadn’t stopped writing for so long between my early twenties and early forties. Apart from anything else, I believe that writing helps me to be a better person. Writing makes me listen to my own voices, and as a result helps me to listen better to the voices of others.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
That’s just the way the cookie crumbled.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I’ve just finished reading David Copperfield – very late on in life, I agree. I have to confess that it is only in the last ten years that I have really taken to much of 19^th-century English literature, to authors such as George Eliot (especially Daniel Deronda), the Brontës (especially Charlotte Brontë’s Villette), and Wordsworth (especially The Prelude). I am not sure why it took me so long to properly enjoy some of the great literature of my own country.

A very powerful and distinctive book of contemporary poetry I read recently is Lucy Hamilton’s Viewer |Viewed (Shearsman, 2023) – my review is just out in PN Review.

The last great film I saw: Anatomy of a Fall, directed by Justine Triet. A good one for writers to watch.

20 - What are you currently working on?

My writing is a bit quiet at the moment. I don’t have any particular project going, but I expect one will emerge as long as I keep ‘turning up’ for the writing.

Thanks so much for the questions, rob!

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Robert Sheppard

Robert Sheppard was born in Sussex, UK, in 1955, and lives in Liverpool, UK, with his wife, the poet and artist Patricia Farrell. His poetry books include Complete Twentieth Century Blues, Salt, 2008; Warrant Error, Shearsman, 2009; History or Sleep: Selected Poems, Shearsman, 2015; and Twitters for a Lark, Shearsman, 2017. Words Out of Time, Knives, Forks and Spoons, 2015, is his ‘autrebiography’, although his website (www.robertsheppard.weebly.com) carries a standard biography. He has collaborated with artist Pete Clarke (see photograph) and calligrapher Thomas Ingmire, amongst others. Also a critic, he has published The Poetry of Saying: British Poetry and its Discontents 1950-2000, Liverpool University Press, 2005; and The Meaning of Form in Contemporary Innovative Poetry, Palgrave, 2016; as well as a collection of essays on Lee Harwood and a monograph on Iain Sinclair. He co-edited Atlantic Drift, a trans-Atlantic anthology of poetry and poetics with James Byrne (Arc/EHUP, 2017). His 1980s magazine Pages (which is continued as his blog (www.robertsheppard.blogspot.com) is archived on Jacket 2. The Robert Sheppard Companion, edited by James Byrne and Christopher Madden, featuring articles on his work, interviews, a full bibliography, and poems, is forthcoming from Shearsman. Retired from teaching, Sheppard is Emeritus Professor of Poetry and Poetics at Edge Hill University, UK.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

I had to check what my first ‘book’ was (I assume pamphlets don’t count). It was: Daylight Robbery, Stride, 1990. I’m always grateful to Rupert Loydell for publishing this. I felt at that point (I was 34 by then) that I’d laid down a marker. My most recent book Twitters for a Lark: Poetry of the European Union of Imaginary Authors, is so different, in that a single-minded ‘linguistically innovative’ poetics has been exchanged for the ‘multiform’ discourses that I think emerge. It’s a book co-created with many peers (including Rupert, incidentally). We produced fictional poets and their verse for each of the 27 (other) European Union countries. It feels more of a crowd, to be amongst friends, actually, collegiate in a good sense: there’s quite a range of poetics and visibility between my collaborators Steve McCaffery and Joanne Ashcroft, for instance. Or between Anamaría Crowe Serrano, the one collaborator I’ve never met, and Patricia Farrell, to whom I am married (and with whom I’ve collaborated for decades).   

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

I think I started by writing songs, words for pre-existing melodies – and later writing lineated words that seemed to be ‘poems’. Later still, at school I was reading TS Eliot (and through him Pound, but not Williams at this stage). And outside of school finding the ‘underground’ poets anthologised in Michael Horovitz’ Children of Albion. It must have had an effect because two of the contributors, Roy Fisher and Lee Harwood, became friends later, and subjects for my PhD. Sorry, I’ve jumped decades now. But I do remember reading, courtesy of Southwick Library in Sussex (which I eulogise in my Words Out of Time), the Penguin Poetry from Africa. And I seem to recall there was a poetry book by Marc Bolan there. This is before he went electric, when he was simply eclectic!

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

At the moment I have two modes of creation. Typically, over the years, I have tended to amass writings (notes, drafts) and then collage them, sometimes in a sweeping, all-enveloping action, perhaps working all day (and occasionally with a system or process). The 40 page set of poems writing-through my friend Trev Eales’ photographs taken from the press pit at rock festivals, ‘Charms and Glitter’, was slowly accumulated as notes and then processed (cutting, lineating, re-writing, re-forming) in one action. However, I am also writing non-traditional versions of traditional English sonnets. There’s one book-length manuscript of these, called The English Strain. At the moment, I’m working through Michael Drayton’s sonnet sequence Idea. Mine is called Bad Idea and it’s about Brexit. I write one each week: I psych myself up and, starting first thing in the morning, they are usually finished by 11.00. In draft.

In draft! Whichever method is used, there still is much revision to be undertaken. Sometimes they are close to the final shape, but I’m never sure. The sonnets (because based on existent poems, like translations) seem to be coming out neatly formed, usually written linearly, which is novel for me. I’m suspicious of that. They all need putting away in envelopes for days, weeks, sometimes months. And then re-formed, and de-formed: forming.  

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

I have a lot of short pieces and they stay short pieces. Assembling them into a book is a problem, though sometimes I am thinking of serial poems. Other times (both the examples above, for example) I am writing a ‘project’: I never assume anything will be necessarily published. In the case of my largest ‘work’, the network of Twentieth Century Blues, which I wrote between 1989 and 2000, I knew I wanted to write a sizeable work but to avoid the magisterial gestures of the twentieth century long poem. Creating multiple strands, I wanted to be able to structure a time-based work (to end in 2000) that could be assembled by a reader in many ways. I thought the small press publication network in the UK necessitated this mode of presentation too, as discrete but linked pamphlets. Book publication was rare during the 1980s and 1990s for ‘innovative’ writers outside of the mainstream. That’s why Daylight Robbery was so important. It’s ironical that the whole project is now published as one linear doorstop tome, Complete Twentieth Century Blues.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

When I’m revising a text (reading it out loud) I sometimes imagine that I am reading to an audience, that there is an immediate (though mute) response. Reading is important to me (and to the British poetry I belong to) and I like to think I’m good at it. It’s another mode of publication, isn’t it? (I’ve run reading series of one kind and another for years, too, though not at the moment).

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

In my poetics piece Pulse I wrote: ‘Throughout this process, contingency is its rhythm, a pulse that matches the varieties of montage, de-montage, that I attempt in my own practice, with interruption as structure, with transformation and transposition, formal resistance, creative linkage, “imperfect fit”, near-perfect fit, all kinds of multi-form unfinish.’ I think that about sums up my current poetics. I am also a critic; my most recent book, The Meaning of Form, opens with the statement: ‘Poetry is the investigation of complex contemporary realities through the means (meanings) of form.’ I could say more about these poetics (and about poetics in general, which I have also written on, as a speculative writerly discourse) but I think I’ll stand by these two statements and muse over them.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

I’m reading the proofs of a book on my work, generously edited by James Byrne and Christopher Madden, The Robert Sheppard Companion, and both Charles Bernstein in the preface and James in the introduction make much of the ‘social’ in my work, both my attempt to bring ‘aesthetic justice’ to the social poetry scene, and in my matching of the ‘matter of history’ and the ‘manner of poetry’ in the work itself. I would hope for this to be true, but it still begs your larger question about the function of the writer. What, for example, do I think that my sonnets about Brexit will achieve? They are satires of our ridiculous national circumstance, very funny I hope! I certainly don’t think my poems will affect the social situation directly (although I temporarily post them on my blog so that there will be some, limited, local, temporal, response) but I know you can’t influence events much (or, rather, there are only limited occasions when that occurs, with some writers, in particular contexts). It could be argued that to turn the ‘matter of history’ into the ‘manner of poetry’ is to reduce the efficacy, to turn the political aesthetic, but that could be positive, if you conceive of the aesthetic dimension, as Marcuse, and even Adorno, did, as a vehicle of critique and a positing of the possibility of an alternative, or – to use different philosophical language – as a means of deterritorialising social redundancies, sweeping out cliché. This seems to me true, as long as one is modest enough to realise that one can only affect the readers of the work, and then only potentially educate their desires. You can’t change the world but you can contribute to the changing of the people who could change the world. It’s indirect, but vital. Forms forming in the act-event that is our encounter with the art-work, as Derek Attridge puts it. Language as a bridge thrown between two people, as Vološinov has it (I write of his social poetics in The Poetry of Saying).

Which doesn’t answer your first question. The larger culture (I speak of Great Britain) increasingly sees writing as part of the cultural industries (a term used without irony, and one which Creative Writing as a subject has assimilated, unexamined, and passed on, normatively, to the next generation). We’re all poets laureate of the dung-heap, as I’ve recently put it. We’re inexpensive parts of the entertainment industry, but this is not reflected in more money for professional writers, whose income has decreased over the last few years. But then, perhaps, part of the function of the contemporary poet, un-employed by the society, a peripheral figure, like a shaman perhaps, is to refuse such professionalisation in favour of ‘useless beauty’ (to quote Elvis Costello) – which brings us back to the aesthetic dimension. Its resistance is there, for those who recognise it, for those who want it.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

Small press poetry editors are generally non-interventionist in the UK. One of the impressive things about working with James Byrne on our anthology Atlantic Drift: Poetry and Poetics (and to see him at work on the Companion) is to watch an astute editorial mind at work. I wish there were more such minds at work on my poetry – but you’ve got to know when to not take advice.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

It’s very tempting to say: to know when not to take advice, given my last answer! But I’m teasing.

This one’s specifically about research for writing, how not to get lost in it. Playwright Louise Page told my MA students that one should research just enough to write the first draft, write the first draft, and then only return to the research to fill in gaps that need filling. Then to proceed, without returning to what you think is research, but which is actually a waste of time (from the point of view of the writing). 

Whether that’s of any use to me is another question! Marjorie Perloff, after my reading of The Lores, told me, ‘Cut that reference to Arafat! It’s too obvious!’ I did as I was told.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?

Very easy. More troubling is what the relation between the two is. Some of that critical work translates into poetics of the creative work (I’ve been showing that in my answers here), but some of it doesn’t. How it affects the work directly is a question I don’t think I can answer, poetics being the speculative discourse that allows for the development of poetic thought, and poetry itself, but not in any programmatic way, and not in ways that are always entirely explicable by the author (or to the author).

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

A morning person. Up and at my work, often the ‘Ark and Archive’ of nearly-daily writing that I have been undertaking for some while, and from which I mine works and parts of works, or use as ‘interfering material’ in collagic writings, or simply undertake as a means of staying ‘writing fit’. Or I’m straight onto a work in progress, whether that’s a longer piece, or (my newest routine, as described above) of writing a complete version of the latest Drayton sonnet. By lunchtime, whatever I’m doing then (re-drafting something, or engaging in the endless reading-through of work as revision, or doing what I call – a joke! – ‘oeuvre management’, re-ordering poems, preparing manuscripts, etc.,), I’ve finished. Actually, I’m beginning to notice I’m wasting the latter parts of the morning. Lunch at 1.00 on the dot, radio news on: got to keep up with the Brexit circus. Afternoons and evenings: less or no writing. Reading. Ordinary life…

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

Creeley said to me in an interview: ‘The only way to write is to write.’ (He was talking about his ‘block’.) Hang on, that might be the best piece of advice I’ve heard!

What I’d do? I’d get a photograph and write about it, from it, out of it. (I’m still working though Hans-Peter Feldman’s book of images Voyeur, which I bought in Berlin in 2004! It’s the fall-back material for the ‘Ark and Archive’. I added to page 477 this morning, 14^th January 2019.)

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

‘Home’ as in my parents’ house: The slowly-melting plastic of a bedside valve radio listened to long into the night.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

This is so huge a question as to be virtually unanswerable. Of course, much of it comes from books, from the traditions and contemporary practices of writing. But those books don’t just come from books, do they? The socius, the psyche and the environment with their three ecologies provide everything we need (and everything we need to protect!). Of course, reading this interview, you can tell that photographs have been important material for me, but that’s not influence. I’m slightly suspicious of that word, the fluvial metaphor that suggests the influenced person or artefact is a passive vessel for whatever has flown into it. No choice. It’s more active, even given accidentals. We find things: art, music, or even that stinking radio that’s about to burst into flames that your last question evoked (‘out of nowhere’, as we, inaccurately, say). 

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

There are hundreds, I think, and they are not necessarily influences (in the sense that you can detect stylistic traces borrowed from them in the work). There some obvious senior poets who have been important to me: Bob Cobbing, Roy Fisher, Lee Harwood, Tom Raworth, Christopher Middleton, Bill Griffiths, and Allen Fisher, to stick to the very-male British Poetry Revival (which is why the list is male). There are peers like Maggie O’Sullivan, Adrian Clarke, Robert Hampson, Alan Halsey and Geraldine Monk, though they are all a bit older than me: let’s add Kelvin Corcoran, then. Then there are younger writers, Scott Thurston, Zoë Skoulding, Amy McCauley, Tom Jenks, Simon Perril, Jèssica Pujol i Duran, Sandeep Parmar, Jeff Hilson – just to stick to British-based poets. Erín Moure means more the more I read her. Let’s not even think about Oppen or Creeley or Rosmarie Waldrop or Amiri Baraka or … Or about the multitude of great writers from the past. My excursion through the sonnets of Petrarch, Wyatt, Surrey, Charlotte Smith, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning was based on respect (less so for Surrey, who was, let’s face it, a bit of a tit). Now grumpy resentful Drayton. I’ve left so many names out. And I’m going to leave it that way.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

I would like to extend the performance side of my work. I’ve worked with dancers and musicians, but not for a while now, or consistently. And perhaps return to writing prose, perhaps less narrative than the stories of The Only Life, Knives Forks and Spoons, 2011, and less ‘experimental’ than Unfinish, Veer, 2016.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

If I’d not been a writer, I probably would have studied history (with perhaps literature as a minor), perhaps become active in politics. But I possibly would have still ended up teaching, which I have done for the last thirty odd years. If I could pick something, I would have gone into blues or rock music as a singer, which is a thing I’ve done now and then. I’m hoping to participate in the Ern Malley Orchestra soon. In the words of Alejandra Pizarnik, which I used as an epigraph to ‘Freeze It’: ‘I would have preferred to sing the blues in any small bar full of smoke than to spend the nights of my life scratching into language …’

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

It’s the compulsion to make, in the only way that is congenial (I don’t mean easy). I fell into it and, despite writing a little fiction, it’s now – after so many years, and after many years of teaching writing (and reading) – simply what I do (one of the things I do).

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

I’m not a film buff, so I’ll allow myself more than one book choice! I have re-read the poems of John Donne, both the startlingly brilliant lyric ones and the odder, more conventional funerary odes. John Carey’s book John Donne is one of the best critical volumes I’ve read; published at the height of structuralism, it speaks directly to the reader’s encounter with the otherness of the work, as Derek Attridge would say, freighted with Carey’s tremendous learning. OK then: Derek Attridge’s brilliant, compressed volume The Singularity of Literature, which assimilates ‘theory’ but speaks directly, with subtlety, about reading. A novel: Conrad’s masterpiece, Nostromo, not having to read it now as part of my Iain Sinclair researches. Currently finishing the short stories of Maupassant. Just beginning reading Great Expectations in the instalments, and with the periodicity, of Dickens’ first publication. Having released myself from full time employment, and having no fresh ideas for straight literary criticism, I’ve released myself from directed reading.

20 - What are you currently working on?

Revising the ‘Charms and Glitter’ poems. They were written quickly and I’m going back through them, slowly, individually.

Bad Idea, which I have described above. I’ve written 26 of the 63 so far, as I trace the Brexit disaster (it’s the ‘meaningful vote’ in Parliament on it tomorrow). That process has its own graceful pace, even if the poems themselves are far from graceful, figuring Britain as a free market Dogging Site run by a bunch of recognisable clowns!

I have just finished one of my long poems, very compressed, of the ‘collagic’ kind, described in my answer to question 3, entitled ‘Flight Risk’ (at the moment), the last part of an untitled collection of quatrain poems, which begins with ‘The Accordion Book’ (which may be read in Adjacent Pineapple web journal).

Some of my ‘English Strain’ sonnets and the first part of ‘The Accordion Book’ are to appear in The Robert Sheppard Companion. I’m looking forward to the launch of that. I’ve yet to work out what I’m going to read. Perhaps I haven’t written it yet.  

14^th January 2019

12 or 20 (second series) questions;