12 or 20 (second series) questions with Victoria Kennefick

Dr Victoria Kennefick is a writer, poet, editor and teacher. She completed a PhD in English Literature at University College Cork and was a Fulbright Scholar at Emory University and Georgia College and State University. Her research on the short stories of Flannery O’Connor and Frank O’Connor was also funded by an IRCHSS Scholarship and a MARBL Fellowship. Her debut poetry collection, Eat or We Both Starve (Carcanet Press, 2021), won the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize and the Dalkey Book Festival Emerging Writer of the Year Award. It was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Costa Poetry Book Award, Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry and the Butler Literary Prize. It was a Book of the Year in The Guardian, The Irish Times, The Sunday Independent and The White Review, and was also selected as one of The Telegraph's Best Poetry Books to Buy 2021. Her second collection, Egg/Shell (Carcanet Press, 2024) was a Poetry Book Society Choice for Spring 2024 and won the Farmgate Café National Poetry Award 2025. It was also BBC Poetry Extra Book of the Month for March as well as a Book of the Year in The Telegraph, The Sunday Independent and The Poetry Society UK. In 2023 she was an Arts Council of Ireland/UCD Writer in Residence as well as Poet in Residence at the Yeats Society Sligo. In 2024, she was Cork County Council Arts Office Writer in Residence. In 2025, she was appointed as the Arts Council of Ireland/Trinity College Dublin Writer Fellow.

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

My first pamphlet, White Whale, was published by Southword Editions as a winner of the Cork International Poetry Festival Fool for Poetry Chapbook Prize and it felt like a miracle that it was chosen to be published and even more so that its launch was part of the festival. It felt like I had finally reached a long-held goal – to publish a book – no matter how slight – and to be a tangible part of the literary conversation I had been following since I was a child and first started to read. Poetry was always my first love – an instinctual language that I recognised and responded to immediately. I think, without putting it too sentimentally, that I felt like I was finally home and a real part of my true community – the poetry community. This validation, and the success and reception of the pamphlet gave me confidence and provided many unexpected opportunities to further publish my work and to hone my craft. My debut collection, Eat or We Both Starve, was published by Carcanet Press in 2021 during the death throes of the pandemic. It was a very weird experience launching it from my mother’s kitchen over Zoom, but I wouldn’t change it for the world now – I think people were available and open to read it as it seemed to just hit at the right moment. It won the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize and the Dalkey Literary Festival Emerging Writer of the Year – as well as being shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Costa Prize for Best Poetry Collection. This success catapulted my words into the wider world and as a result I was able to take a career break from my job as a secondary school teacher (which I am still on!) and work as a writer, poet, mentor and freelance creative writing teacher full-time – my lifelong dream! I am so grateful to all who made this possible and particularly to the Arts Council of Ireland who have supported me financially and creatively every step of my writing career to date. My more recent work is my second poetry collection, Egg/Shell (Carcanet Press, 2024) and it is a very different animal in many respects – particularly as I explore more complex themes and allow myself to experiment more with language and form. It is a more intense book – and a softer one, I think, than my debut.

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

I loved reading everything as a child – voraciously and without much discernment to begin with – but poetry seemed to be to be the most honest and uncompromising of the genres. I was a very intense, sensitive and curious child – I always felt so very weird being human – being a person constantly confused me (it still does, to be honest!) and poetry seemed to be where people truly and intelligently explored this experience in a way that was entirely vulnerable and utterly frank. It very quickly became the place where I would go find answers to my trickiest questions. There was room to be curious and demanding there! I remember finding out very early on that ‘stanza’ was the Italian word for ‘room’ and this brought me great joy. This poetic language was one I innately understood and felt at home in – these rooms were my rooms. Then I started making small word buildings myself.  

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?

There is no one way! I am in constant flux in my writing process as I am in everything in my life. I am learning still to accept and appreciate this flow. I feel like I am always writing – every day a poem or a line or the feeling of a poem visits me in some way, shape or form. Mostly, I succeed in writing it down on the notes app on my phone or recording it – rarely I forget or can’t access something to record it on so there are some poems that are lost and still floating around hoping for a chance to be caught again – maybe by another poet who is more aligned to the moment! After a period of gathering these snippets and fragments, recording and paintings, articles and songs, I can feel the book coming together because all of these parts start to reach out to one another in some way that I can’t logically explain – they attach on different levels – and often they might grow new offshoots or others might wilt and die. Then it is time to immerse myself. I usually do a week-long retreat once a year – or I try to – and then I write for seven days solid – the bones of the book. It is a frenzy, and I am not very sociable or coherent during this phrase. I hold the feeling. I must live it and let it live through me. I try to let the document sit for a week or so after that and then begin my revisions which are vigorous and lengthy. I use a different brain for that process, and it takes anything from a month to six months depending on the quality of my focus and the busyness of my life. When that part is complete, I finally send it to my wonderful, astute and very sensitive editor at Carcanet Press, John McAuliffe.

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?

Since publishing my first book, I write short pieces, but I am always conscious of a larger body of work that it may or may not be a part of. I love thinking about the book and how these little fragments will form part of a whole – while also being whole in and of themselves – it’s very organic, don’t you think?

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

I do enjoy readings, in my own way. I find enormous peace and focus on the stage reading from the page. It’s like time stops and everything is clear. The more social before and after aspects are a wee bit trickier, I must admit but I think that’s understandable given the nature of the poet brain – always working, always analysing, always feeling – I am totally exhausted and spent after events and yet I am constantly surprised and vexed by this! 

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?

Yes, I have all the concerns, all the time! Now I am interested in being honest and open on the page, but not necessarily being factual. That’s an important distinction. I am also fascinated by how the structure of the poem allows for vulnerability but also has an inbuilt protector for the writer. I often wonder if poetry is actually a boundary between me and other people rather than the connective force I think it to be.

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?

Personally speaking, I feel my vocation is to ‘say the thing’ – that which is difficult or shameful or impossible for people to express in their own lives. Maybe a poet is a channel of some sort? I also feel it is my calling to honour the complexity and nuance of life’s interior experience and find some kind of acceptance and healing through creating new poems that externalise this in some way. Formally, I think poetic structures, the use of white space, language choices, register etc. have so much to offer in how we process thoughts, emotions and intense feeling of all kinds.

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

The key is to find the right editor and to be very aware of your own ego – so for me working with an outside editor is essential when it comes to the near-final stages of book making.

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

It doesn’t matter what you do, it only matters that you do it.

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

This is a dangerous question! My only routine now is that I don’t have one and there is no such thing as a typical day for me. I am in two minds about whether this is a problem or not, but perhaps I would benefit with some kind of balance in this regard – this is always a work-in-progress!

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

I go to visual art, the work of other writers and poets, and walking in nature – particularly by the sea – always nourishes and soothes me. 

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Salty sea spray.

13 - 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?

Absolutely yes – visual art. Walking through an art gallery is like walking through a poetry collection for me.

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

There are so, so many – and their importance waxes and wanes depending on what I am writing about – anyone from Patrick Kavanagh to Miranda July, from Ntozake Shange to Mariana Spada, Gustav Parker Hibbett to Sylvia Plath

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

Everything and nothing.

16 - 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?

A visual artist or a very earnest and hammy actor.

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

There was nothing else.

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

Great is such a weighty value – most recently, I loved the adaptation Nosferatu (Eggers, 2024) because its unrelenting bleak tension and flat intensity (a compliment) made me feel so extremely calm.  This year I’ve hugely enjoyed Open, Heaven (Cape, 2025) by Seán Hewitt.

19 - What are you currently working on?

Too many things but also just enough. The new poetry collection is percolating and there are also some essays brewing. It is an exciting time. I don’t honestly know what I will write next.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Éireann Lorsung

Éireann Lorsung [photo credit: David Torralva] works in a field of images, objects, movement, and texts, and especially in the overlap between printmaking and poetry. Her publications include The Century, winner of the Maine Literary Award in Poetry, Her book, and Music for Landing Planes By, named a 'new and noteworthy collection' by Poets & Writers. Pattern-book (2025) is newly out from Carcanet Press, and Milkweed Editions will publish Pink Theory! in 2026. She is a 2016 NEA Fellow and held the 2025 Mary Routt Endowed Chair of Writing at Scripps College.

[Éireann Lorsung reads in Dublin at Books Upstairs on Sunday, July 13 at 2pm with Canadian writers rob mclennan and Christine McNair, and Irish poet Christodoulos Makris]

1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My first book, Music For Landing Planes By, was also my MFA thesis (in a revised form), and that it was published at all that changed my life—or, really, what I understood to be possible for me. My teacher at the University of Minnesota, William Reichard, had had us write post-MFA publication trajectories as part of our thesis class. I had very sincerely written that I planned to make a dozen copies of my manuscript and leave them on public buses, benches, and in the grocery store. This was the extent of my interest in publication at the time. To his credit, Bill knew me well enough to know that I was totally serious, and he sent my manuscript to Milkweed without my knowledge. (I have no qualms about this. I would not have submitted the manuscript on my own, possibly ever.) Without Bill, I doubt I would have had a first book, which means I would not have had my second or third collections with Milkweed either. I am certain I would still be writing and publishing in all kinds of forms—making books myself, publishing other people—but my sense of myself as participating in literature in public would likely be very different. Bill's generosity and perceptiveness opened a path for me I would not have known was there, or how to open, for myself.

My most recent collection, Pattern-book, is in some ways very close to Music For Landing Planes By. It's different from the intervening two collections which are in some ways more rangey. Pattern-book contains mostly short poems (≤ two pages). Most of these are in the lyric tradition that was given to me as the primary tradition of anglophone poetry when I was a student. Like that first book, I can see my attraction to and tendency to think using image in this new collection. I also see certain religious principles—wonder at bigness and complexity, the preciousness of living things—at work in both books. This collection is different from my first collection, though, in part because time has passed and I have lived away from the city where I was brought up (though Minneapolis still figures prominently in these poems). I can now also understand my writing reflectively and contextually in ways I couldn't when I was a younger writer, and I think this has allowed me to structure the new book in more intricate ways; I can rely on my acuity of perception as well as on the intuition that years of reading gave me.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
My parents gave me poetry alongside visual art and music and things to eat and places to go, one of many ordinary beautiful things that should be and can be democratically available. We had some children's poetry books, and when I was in high school my dad gave me his copy of Edna St Vincent Millay's Poems Selected for Young People. But books were just around. My dad taught special ed and had done a teaching Master's and so he had the books from that in the house—he had loved and still revered his poetry teacher—and so I read Understanding Poetry and other such textbooks when I was in high school as well. We didn't have a ton of money, but we did have great access to the public library, to public museums like the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and to music both on the radio and in our house. So poetry was just a normal part of life, one more thing that was possible.

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 am always "collecting data"—literally collecting instances of plants or weather or bus routes, among other things. And I am always assembling poems and other things from that data and from observations and impressions. Projects are less things I begin and more things I realize are happening when I put a frame around some of the things that are already ongoing. Because I am writing all the time—not very much at a time, but in a more or less continuous way—by the time my brain catches up and begins to suggest forms or 'project' ideas, the work is almost always there in pieces. So things come slowly and then happen quickly. That means tracing a single draft is, at least in the last five or ten years, less straightforward. And in fact I'm interested in the way the same phrase, image, idea may recur across poems or other work, without ever getting "used up".

4 - Where does a poem or work of prose 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?
As above, I tend to be-writing and then realize certain conceptual or formal likenesses that are taking place. I generally then respond to these, amplifying or complementing them. Once I have a book in mind, it often helps me reframe and reposition individual poems—ones I had thought were definitely in may be sorted out by a given frame, and others brought in. For example, when I was writing The Century, one working title was Mother Country, Fatherland, and then I had a number of poems in the manuscript that more directly thought about family structures. Those are almost all gone in the book that ended up being published—not because I didn't like them, but because the focusing idea in the book shifted and they no longer did what I wanted the book to do. I do think about books as forms in themselves, and though I don't write toward a book necessarily, I do revise toward the book once I know what it is, meaning thinking about what poems go in, in what order, and why.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I love to read. I love to perform. To me, speaking poems in public is an essential part of writing/publishing. What I read, and how, depends on what the audience is, where we are, what time of day it is. I like to think about performance as yet another way of revising the poems or the book—a separate, but related, project. Reading aloud to others is about equal to the thrill of being translated, to me. Audiences are a true gift.

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?
Yes, I am trying to figure out how language does what it does. I am also interested in charisma: how can the writing convince the world to look (not necessarily at the writing but at the world)? What are the uses of charisma on the page and how does it appear? And I am also trying to see what it's like to work in as narrow a circumference as I can, and, relatedly, how to insist that nothing is beneath notice. I am trying to ask myself to stay with things I might be tempted to say have been resolved, or can be taken for granted. I am trying to ask myself, "how do you know?" when I say, "I know".

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?
I think the role of the writer should be like the role of the bus driver, librarian, teacher, grocery store worker, post officer, etc.: to do what you do as fully as possible, with as deep a sense of being among other people whose lives are as real and precious as your own as possible. To be attentive and to care for others' attentiveness. To take time and to make a world in which others can also take time.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I think this depends on the editor. I know that being read with care and precision is one of the greatest gifts—and so rare. I recently had the experience of being copy-edited by the Kenyon Review editors and it was so thorough and so attentive to every detail. It felt like having a very good doctor. They really had figured out what I meant and caught tiny gradations of meaning that I hadn't been able to. In general I find working with editors—who tend to be readers who are both committed and open at the same time—a very welcome thing.

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

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to prose to the graphic essay)? What do you see as the appeal?
Generally very easy, but also perhaps not so much about appeal or even decision anymore. I have gotten to a point where I can kind of sense what the texture of the idea is and what kind of form it will want. Sometimes this gets revised in the making, or I reprise the idea in another form or genre. But generally the ideas come with their forms and genre demands attached.

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?
Right now I don't have a writing routine in the standard sense (a certain duration of writing on a regular schedule). We have had a very unsettled few years—since 2020, really—and I deal with unsettledness by establishing short-term constraints that I can respond to. For example, from March of 2023 through March of 2024, I wrote an essay every week and posted it online in a public space. I also keep running notes, added to almost daily on my walk to work and on errands, where I track plant and animal life as well as weather and encounters with human beings—these are for a longer-term project that I don't yet know the form of. When I have a deadline, I get that work done in a number of short stints—usually I can write an essay in a few sittings, and revise in a few more. But I long for a time when I know we will not be moving, I know that we have stable employment, and I can imagine just writing for an hour every day. I struggle to do that when I feel like there are so many things up in the air. Like a lot people probably, my day generally begins by looking at the texts I've gotten overnight. I try to read on paper after that, and not to look at news or Bluesky until after breakfast.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Repeating something I've already done is one of my go-to methods for unsticking myself.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Soda bread or brownies baking; Lemon Pledge (dusting fluid).

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?
Yes to all of these! And philosophy as well. I don't know how to make work except to be looking at pictures, reading books and papers and poems, listening to lectures, walking around in the world, listening to music. Of course this means that some of the things I make don't act "like poems"; I have had people tell me, on several occasions, that my poems are "too philosophical" to be poems (no), or that they "have no form" (no), or that my wide focus means my life "doesn't make sense" (also no). But I understand that my breadth of interests and inputs means that I am not always making things in ways that are recognizable, including to myself. I make them to find out what they might be.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
People writing now: Christina Sharpe, whose In The Wake is a central text for method and also poetics for me; her Ordinary Notes is also in my pantheon. Kiese Laymon—he is able to say clearly what he means, and I love the chapter called "Meager" in Heavy especially. He seems to have a real commitment to transparency and to know what he values and why. I admire that. Tressie McMillan Cottom, similarly, for her clarity and commitments, and also for the way she writes sociology for a broad audience without giving in to the (false) idea that that audience can't handle complexity. Gillian Allnutt, the living writer I feel is closest to Dickinson. Kate Zambreno, whose Heroines and To Write as if Already Dead are precious to me. Leslie Marmon Silko for Ceremony, one of the most perfect books in the world. Thomas A. Clark, whose work with his wife Laurie Clark I find a beautiful model of an artist's life, and whose Farm By The Shore is a delight from start to finish. Similarly, the life-work of Erica Van Horn and Simon Cutts, who run Coracle Press—and whose 'writing' extends to the deeply creative acts of housemaking and housekeeping—is very inspirational to me.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I would like to own a house and be able to live in one place for a decade at least. I'd like to be able to paint the walls and plant some fruit trees and get used to staying. And I would like to have steady and consistent access to healthcare.

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 would love to be an orchestra conductor. If I weren't writing—but I can't imagine a life where I was not making poems and other things—I am sure I would be teaching. Teaching is and always has been the primary way I think of my occupation.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
It was there, it was free, and it could be done anytime. And reading alone and with others always felt good.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Lara Pawson's Spent Light. Films: in the theater, Perfect Days. At home, Before Sunrise.

20 - What are you currently working on?
A book dealing with the artist Corita Kent, for whom teaching was as important as her art practice, about teaching and artmaking and the worlds that collaboration opens up for both. I'm also working on things to do with others—workshops making concrete poems using screenprinting; a series of banner-making sessions that lead to public processions.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

12 or 20 (second series) questions with James Davies

James Davies is a poet whose works includes stack, Plants, Forty-Four Poems and a Volta, A Dog, Snow, Rocks, and Acronyms. He is also the author of two novels: The Wood Pigeons & When Two Are in Love or As I Came To Behind Frank's Transporter (written in collaboration with Philip Terry), as well as the short stories The Ten Superstrata of Stockport J. Middleton & Changing Piece. In addition to being the editor of if p then q, between 2008-2018, he was the co-organiser of The Other Room reading series & resources website in Manchester, and in 2017-18 he was Poet in Residence at The University of Surrey.  

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

Three of my earliest published works: The Manual Handling Process, Acronyms and Plants deal with trying not to say. The Manual Handling Process is a piece of found poetry. The poems in Acronyms are original acronyms that I’ve coined which don’t originate from any source words. Half of the poems in Plants are a sequence called ‘unmades’ that record the deletion of poems. Most of the rest of Plants is filled with my own flarf, which is to say that I wrote the junk rather than harvesting it from the internet, preferring the process of writing my own garbage rather than trawling through the web. Poems like ‘Kate Bush’, ‘wasps’ and ‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill’ – a translation of Wordsworth’s poem – are done through my own flarf voice. My current work tries to say more I guess. My book ‘stack’ is predominantly about walking. And my latest published book Forty-Four Poems and a Volta, and the as-yet-unpublished All is but Toys, have poems which discuss our ecological crisis through a minimalist poetics.

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

I got the spark from reading Keats when doing my A-levels. I also got into Surrealism at the same time, Magritte and Dali primarily. I read The Surrealist Manifesto, and in those pages read Dali’s poem Dandled Brochure which was a big influence. Seeing that a painter could write poems, and that art was fluid and highly malleable was important. Then I wrote like crazy – maybe 2000 poems – all shapes and sizes, from the age of 16 until say 22.

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 generally write quickly. Most of my poems nowadays are short. Once they’re written I give them breathing space and then tinker with them in small ways. About two years ago I did a complex translation of William Carlos Williams’s ‘so much depends’. That poem went through a lot of working on the page but heavy editing is an anomaly nowadays. In the past I used to write longer poems more regularly and edit and edit until the last version looked nothing like the first. So I've been through that process and enjoyed it and perhaps miss it. Two sonnets that were worked for hours and hours eventually became two deleted poems in ‘unmades’, just leaving the title of the poem and the date of the deletion.

4 - Where does a poem or work of fiction 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?

Each of my last three or four books of poetry use a particular form that I've stuck to throughout. I often target writing a certain number of poems and then the impetus to write in that way is usually exhausted.

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

I enjoy giving readings very much. Reading in front of an audience allows me to explore different ways of presenting the poems. At readings I often present versions or remixes of the work in the books. PowerPoint for example has been something I’ve used often. More recently I’ve been making single poems from All is but Toys into one-off books or sculptures. I’ve made about seventy or so and read from them to the audience. I use various detritus for the covers and the pages, and bind the books crudely. For some books I use materials like jars, cans and lightbulbs as the book covers. They’re beautiful things.

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?

‘stack’ was written for a PhD and I suppose behind the poem is some theory. I would probably prefer to call it influence and politics. Amongst other things ‘stack’ explores minimalist poetry and various ways of walking. However, there are many other theoretical concerns which interest me and I do not believe that poetry needs a one-size-fits-all model, or universal manifesto.

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?

Again I would say there is not a one-size-fits-all answer to this question. For me, at the moment my principal concern is to write for my own growth. One thing that makes a piece of writing great is if it is original. Any readers of my work would have to be the judge of whether I'm successful in that pursuit. As a reader, for me to be really excited, I like to read poems that do something new. However, I can see the importance of poems that have valuable messages to deliver, yet which aren't especially interesting from a formal perspective.

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

It's not essential but it can be useful to have another person's perspective. Generally, nowadays, when I submit a manuscript I am confident that it's working. The best editors are probably those that I show the work to before I submit. And the best of those editors is my partner.

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

In a BBC Imagine documentary the artist Sean Scully says that if you are confident in your work and abilities, ignore what any detractors say and basically take no shit. Another piece of wisdom comes from John Berryman, who in conversation with Al Alvarez says that the validity of a poet’s work is in the close correspondence with a handful of people who genuinely believe in your work.

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

The two novels that I've written both tell stories: The Wood Pigeons and When Two Are In Love or As I Came To Behind Frank's Transporter (co-written with Philip Terry), as well as my recent short story The Ten Superstrata of Stockport J. Middleton (a rewrite of the first page of Philip K. Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch). My poetry on the other hand has no narrative elements to it. The appeal of writing in different genres is therefore simply to write for a different purpose.

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?

No writing routine. It wouldn't be useful. Most of the poems I write are very short and I write them when they come to me. When the writing is longer I try to write the poem there and then if possible, or at least a sketch of it, then look for some free time later.

However, in contradiction to saying that I have conducted a number of daily writing projects, all of which have involved writing in a short space of time using a system. My novel The Wood Pigeons started off as a 365 word story. I then proceeded to remove a word at a rate of roughly one per day for a year, which for the grammar to work amounted to 261 days = 261 pages. Some projects have more directly investigated time. doing (published in Rampike and ctrl+alt+dlt) involved me writing a line after looking at some plastic cubes and some plastic detritus (if and only if I felt a strong energy). The line is always ‘i looked at the bits of plastic’ with a date added. I wrote around thirty lines over five years, so not very many but the project was with me that whole time. In contrast in if I roll a five then i stamp the date each day, for five years, I rolled a six-sided die that had the number five on every side. After I rolled a five (as of course is inevitable) I stamped an index card with the date and filed that away. Both of those projects are indebted to the great artists On Kawara and Tehching Hsieh. I haven’t committed to any more daily writing projects recently like that. Both of these gave me tremendous pleasure in writing poetry daily or regularly. Yet, at the same time, being aware of the passing of time was very painful. Maybe some people might pass into a state of enlightenment that way; it felt something close for me.

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

These three usually do the trick: walking, visiting art galleries, reading.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

The sea.

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 can think of too many things over the years that have influenced my work. You often find lists of thanks in pop CDs from the late 80s onwards. The band Loop Guru sometimes publish an inspiration list in the sleeve notes of their albums. So here’s mine as an epigraph to the poems I’m currently writing, in no particular order: Underworld, The Prodigy (the first two albums), Suzanne Ciani’s Seven Waves, Mike Oldfield (the first four albums), Yes (Fragile and Close to the Edge), Stephen Ratcliffe, William Basinski, John Clare, Kate Bush’s Aerial, Philip K. Dick, Vangelis’s Blade Runner soundtrack, outer space, Wittgenstein, Yoko Ono, Ben Patterson, Fluxus scores as a whole, Robert Grenier, P. Inman, Carl Andre, Robert Lax, William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, Aram Saroyan, the ecological crisis, The Future Sound of London’s Lifeforms and ISDN, Lawrence Weiner, Donald Judd, Heimat, Steve Reich, Mike Nelson, Rebecca Horn, talkingwalking.net, Ulrike Ottinger, Robert Fitterman’s Rob’s Word Shop, Dieter Roth, MMU Special Collections Library, The Poetry Library London, The Orb’s Orbus Terrarum, Joe Simpson, Peter Jaeger’s Midamble, Thomas A. Clark, Alex Haley, my own walking experience, Dan Flavin, David Lynch, Richard Long, Hamish Fulton, On Kawara, Teching Hsieh, Harold Budd, Hermann Hesse, Issa, Kurt Schwitters, Vito Acconci, Ursula le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven, Mondrian, Carlos Casteneda’s The Teaching of Don Juan, Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Robert Calendar, Ellie Harrison, Mette-Sophie D. Ambeck’s 367, Wayne Thiebaud, Buddha, Clark Coolidge, Marina Abramović , Cindy Sherman, Dorothy Wordsworth, family and friends, Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, Lee Kang-hyo.

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

See 14.

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

I have just started a walking project which (if completed at all) will take many, many years. The intension is to walk ten miles or more on each of the 403 UK ordnance survey maps. The only other rule is that on each of these individual walks I won't cross over onto another map. The project will definitely inspire some writing but at the moment I don’t plan any writing directly related to it.

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?

A badminton player. It’s all based on instinct, you are completely in the moment, a moment with incredibly purity and beautiful patterns.

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

For me writing often puts me in an extreme state of bliss. There are other activities in life where I feel a similar level of bliss; I've mentioned some of them in this interview. If writing stopped giving me extreme bliss any longer then I'd abandon it.

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

For a book I’ll go for Will Montgomery's Short Form American Poetry which I’ve just finished. It’s exhilarating throughout. The chapters on Lorine Niedecker and Larry Eigner are particularly astute. I’ll modify the second part of this question by choosing the ten-part TV series Too Old To Die Young directed by Nicholas Winding Refn which has some stunning lighting and photography.

20 - What are you currently working on?

In the last two books that I’ve written – Forty-Four Poems and a Volta and All is but Toys – I use a two-liner form; a form that probably originates in the work of Aram Saroyan and Robert Grenier or in Fluxus scores as Will Montgomery has recently suggested. I'm continuing to use this form for new poems. These poems are often written using disjunctive syntax. The effect of the collapsed language slows down the reading process and opens up multiple meanings. At the back of my mind the naïve voice that I’m currently alludes to the collapse of language and the planet. It seems the right way to go about writing at the moment.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Ongoing notes: late May, 2016

Further to our baby distractions, I thought I should add a second entry of brief reviews, acknowledging the books over the past two years-plus that I started to review, but, for whatever child-related reason, I wasn’t able to complete as a longer, full-sized review. Here are some notes, if not even regrets (I’m surprised at how many scraps there are, and how long they’ve been sitting, unfinished, upon my computer), on a couple more books that I wish I’d more time and attention to properly discuss (as they each, obviously, deserve).

The Belladonna* Elders Series 6: M. NourbeSe Philip, Gail Scott, Kate Eichhorn (2009): In many ways, the most interesting element of this all-Canadian volume of The Belladonna Elders Series is Kate Eichhorn herself, composing works that build upon what her two chosen elders, M. NourbeSe Philip and Gail Scott, have been working on for years. In two interviews, later included in longer versions in the anthology Prismatic Publics: Innovative Canadian Women's Poetry and Poetics (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2009) [see my review of such here].

NB: Because for me when I work in English, I always feel as if I am working in a foreign language.

KE: Even with your mastery?

NP: I never ever take it for granted. The course of the foreignness is the awareness that this is not my tongue. Mind you, I think that all writers and poets have this sense. As you write your poem, you have this idea of perfection, but of course, what I am talking about is slightly different from that. I'm talking about this sense of utter foreignness in what is supposed to be my mother tongue. When I was working on the poem, I remember sitting in this room on St. Clair Avenue in Toronto that I rented from a doctor, my doctor in fact. I had a room at the back of his office, and there were some days when I felt that I could actually taste the foreignness of these words. I can't apply profound theoretical language to it. I can only go to the body and tell you what it felt like. There was this awareness of that and all I could do was weep and weep. Maybe it was some sort of collective memory.

In her “Preface: The Elder Function,” Eichhorn writes:

The Belladonna Elders Series has proven far more controversial than anticipated. Some critics have charged that the term “elder” is inherently ageist. Others have suggested that the structure of the series reifies problematic notions of artistic lineage. A few detractors have even implied that the Elders Series is symptomatic of a generation of writers unable to invent anew, choosing instead to linger indefinitely as a parasitic presence on their “host” (an older and apparently more vital generation of writers). These objections have arrived from critics speaking across generations and genders. But as Belladonna* curators Rachel Levitsky and Erica Kaufman have repeatedly explained, running counter to prevailing definitions in our culture, the term “elder” is neither synonymous with “old” nor does it signify a stable identitary position.

I came to appreciate the complexity of the elder function during one of my first interviews with a writer in the early 1990s. Maria Campbell, a Métis writer and storyteller, had been invited to speak at a Native elders conference hosted by my university. She graciously offered to spare a few minutes of her time but explained that this was an elder's conference, so I would have to conduct the interview in the presence of her elders, and because they would potentially be better positioned to respond, she might not speak at all. In the end, this was not an interview with an author but rather an encounter with a writer/storyteller speaking amongst others. I had arrived well prepared, or so I thought, to navigate the complexities of power and appropriation this encounter was bound to raise. I left perplexed, wondering whether I had carried out an interview at all (I don't recall asking any questions). This, of course, is precisely the kind of productive trouble wrought by elders, and for this reason, adopting the category for an avant-garde reading and book series may be surprising, but it is by no means antithetical to the work of a project such as Belladonna*.

Modern Canadian Poets: An Anthology, eds. Evan Jones and Todd Swift: Evan Jones and Todd Swift’s Modern Canadian Poets: An Anthology (Manchester UK: Carcanet Press, 2010) certainly lives up to its initial hype, despite the inclusion of poets David McGimpsey, Lisa Robertson and Anne Carson, in being an anthology of “Modern” Poets from Canada (those exceptions, I’d note, are also poets possibly known and read better outside Canadian borders than from within). Going through the list of authors—W.W.E. Ross (1894-1966)? Alfred Bailey (1905-1997)?—I initially wondered if this was an anthology aimed at what they saw of the British poetry audience, once that doesn’t necessarily jibe with what little I’m aware of such, from way across the pond, mind you. As the editors write in their introduction: “It is now more than fifty years since an anthology of Canadian poetry was edited for a British audience. As editors, and as Canadian poets living in a foreign clime on a new shore, it has appeared to us that there is little or no groundwork on which to build, no models towards whom we could reach. In Britain, there is scant knowledge of Canadian poetry.”

Despite an awareness of British poetry favouring formal models over experimentation, my original question was this: is this an anthology for those interested in contemporary poetry titles by Carcanet, Bloodaxe Books and Faber over, say, titles by Stride, Shearsman, Salt or Reality Street Editions? Instead, I’m realizing this an anthology directed to the classroom, given its historical swath across a century and a half of Canadian writing, working to produce an anthology that exactly pushes the mandate of the “modern” period. But then, how do McGimpsey, Robertson and Carson fit in?