12 or 20 (second series) questions with Patrick Sylvain

Patrick Sylvain is a Haitian-American educator, poet, writer, social and literary critic, and translator whose work explores Haiti and the Haitian diaspora’s culture, politics, language, and religion. The author of several poetry collections in English and Haitian, Sylvain’s poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and appear in leading journals including Ploughshares, Callaloo, Transition, Prairie Schooner, Agni, American Poetry Review, SpoKe, The Caribbean Writer, and African American Review. His short stories are also widely published. He holds degrees from UMass-Boston, Harvard, Boston University, and Brandeis University, where he was the Shirle Dorothy Robbins Creative Writing Prize Fellow. Sylvain recently taught Global, Transnational, and Postcolonial Literature at Simmons University and served on Harvard’s History and Literature Tutorial Board. As of Fall 2026, Sylvain is Associate Professor in the  Department of Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies, and Director of the minor in Human Rights at UMass Boston. His publications include Education Across Borders (Beacon Press, 2022) and Underworlds (Central Square Press, 2018). Forthcoming works in 2026 include: Scorched Pearl of the Antilles (Palgrave Macmillan) and poetry collections from Arrowsmith Press (Fire on the Tongue), Finishing Line press (Habits of Light), and Central Square Press (Unfinished Dreams / Rèv San Bout).

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

P.S.: My first full collection, Zansèt (Ancestors), written in Haitian Creole in 1994, marked a turning point in my life. At the time, I was a member of the Dark Room Collective, a public school teacher in Cambridge, and deeply engaged in activism around democracy and human rights. I set out to write a book that would embrace the full essence of poetry without retreating from the political. I wanted to experiment with language and offer an aesthetic that departed from what many Haitian readers expected.

The book became, in many ways, a hybrid form—merging American poetics, which tend toward the imagistic, exploratory, and personal, with Franco-Haitian traditions that are philosophical, surrealist-leaning, and socially engaged. Its reception, including the generous preface by Marie-Laurence Jocelyn Lassègue, the former Haitian Minister of Information and Culture, affirmed for me that I could dwell seriously in the craft. It gave me permission to see myself as a poet.

Fire on the Tongue, by contrast, reflects a more elastic and mature poetic consciousness. If my early work emerged from instinct and urgency, this later work arises from a deeper sense of intentionality and self-possession. But that evolution has not been linear. What I once understood as personal growth has revealed itself to be inseparable from history, displacement, and the political conditions that shaped my earliest awareness. This collection engages themes of identity, memory, exile, and cultural buoyancy. It navigates immigration, adaptation, loss, and self-understanding—what it means to live with two feet on different soils. While grounded in a Haitian-American experience, the work seeks resonance with the broader condition of migration and belonging.

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

P.S.: I came to poetry at fifteen, through love and through history. I fell deeply for a girl who had just moved into my neighborhood in Port-au-Prince. Like many adolescents, I discovered language through longing—the way words could carry desire, absence, and imagination.

At the same time, I was coming of age under the dictatorship of Jean-Claude Duvalier. I began writing with what I think of now as a split tongue: privately composing poems of resistance against the regime, and love poems for the girl who stirred me profoundly. From the beginning, poetry became a space where intimacy and politics converged.

Over time, poetry ceased to be merely an artistic practice and became a mode of consciousness—a way of testing truth against lived experience.

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?

P.S.: I write almost every day. As I’ve grown older, I find myself demanding more rigor from my own language. I’m deeply interested in how words act upon the psyche, how they shape and are shaped by our collective human experience.

My process is iterative. I move through multiple drafts, often beginning with fragments—images, phrases, tonal gestures. These fragments function as building blocks. Over time, they begin to suggest an internal architecture, an image system that the poem is trying to construct into a coherent whole. The work rarely arrives fully formed; it is built, dismantled, and rebuilt.

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?

P.S.: A poem often begins with an image or a pressure—a moment that refuses to remain silent. Sometimes, it is a line, other times a rhythm, or a memory that insists on being revisited.

I tend to write individual poems that later reveal themselves as part of a larger constellation. Only after writing do I begin to see how they speak to one another, how they might belong to the same emotional or conceptual landscape. In that sense, the “book” emerges retrospectively, as an act of listening and arrangement rather than premeditated design.

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

P.S.: Public readings are both an extension of and a counterpoint to the private act of writing. Writing is solitary, interior, often slow. Readings return the poem to the body—to voice, breath, and community.

I value readings because they allow me to hear the poem differently, to experience its cadence in real time, and to witness how it lives in the presence of others. At the same time, the performance aspect can feel at odds with the inwardness of composition. I inhabit both spaces, recognizing that poetry ultimately belongs to both silence and sound.

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?

P.S.: Yes. My work is driven by questions about language, history, and consciousness. I am interested in how language both reveals and obscures truth, how it carries memory, and how it can resist or reproduce structures of power.

I often ask: What does it mean to speak authentically within inherited systems of language? How does one write from within displacement without reducing it to metaphor? What is the relationship between personal memory and collective history?

The current questions, for me, revolve around belonging, migration, and the ethics of representation in a fractured world (even a corrupt one. Corruption is a form of moral pollution).

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?

P.S.: The writer still has a role, though it is neither singular nor fixed. At its most vital, writing bears witness. It interrogates dominant narratives, preserves memory, and creates space for alternative ways of seeing.

In a culture saturated with information, the writer’s task may be less about producing more content and more about deepening attention—slowing down perception, complicating easy truths, and resisting erasure.

The writer should remain accountable to both language and community.

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

P.S.: Both. It can be difficult because writing is deeply personal, and revision often requires letting go of what one has grown attached to. But it is essential because an editor brings an external clarity—a different set of eyes attuned to structure, coherence, and possibility.

A good editor does not impose but reveals. They help the writer see the work more fully.

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

P.S.: “Trust the poem, but do not trust your first impulse.” That advice has stayed with me because it honors intuition while insisting on discipline—it reminds me that the initial spark matters, but it must be tested and refined through craft and revision.

Yusef Komunyakaa often echoed a similar balance when he said, “write with your heart, and edit with your mind.” I remember him once, sitting outside the Carpenter Center on Quincy Street at Harvard, saying, “allow yourself to be surprised by what the poem is revealing, and don’t force it to reveal something that the voice in the poem did not ask of it.” That idea—of discovery rather than control—continues to shape how I approach writing.

When I sit down to write, I often feel the presence of both Robert Pinsky and Komunyakaa not too far off in my cognitive and poetic distance, as reminders to balance instinct with intention, and openness with precision.

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

P.S.: Moving between poetry and academic prose is both challenging and generative. Each genre demands a different relationship to language—poetry privileges compression and resonance, while academic prose requires clarity, argument, and exposition.

The appeal lies in the tension. Each form sharpens the other. Poetry deepens my sensitivity to language; scholarship disciplines my thinking.

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?

P.S.: I don’t follow a strict routine, but I write daily, usually late at night or very early in the morning. Those hours offer a kind of quiet that allows language to surface more freely.

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

P.S.: I return to reading—poetry, philosophy, history. I also return to memory, to lived experience. Sometimes I step away from writing altogether and allow silence to do its work.

Stagnation is often a sign that something deeper is asking to be understood.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

P.S.: The scent of salt air mixed with dust after rain. Also the smell of coffee brewing early in the morning—those sensory traces carry me back to Haiti, to childhood, to a sense of rootedness that persists despite distance. Hibiscus flowers as well.

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?

P.S.: Music, visual art, and history deeply inform my work. Music, especially, shapes my sense of rhythm and tonal variation. Visual art influences how I think about imagery and composition. Even scientific thought—its precision and curiosity—can enter the way I approach language.

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

P.S.: Writers who engage both the lyrical and the political have been central to my development—those who refuse to separate aesthetics from history. I’m drawn to voices that challenge language while remaining accountable to lived experience.

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

P.S.: I would love to learn how to fly—either a plane or a helicopter. There is something about flight that speaks to freedom, perspective, and risk.

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?

P.S.: I am already an educator, which I value deeply. Teaching keeps me grounded in language and in dialogue. If I had not taken this path, I might have become a lawyer. I’m drawn to rhetoric and the art of argument, though not to its more manipulative uses.

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

P.S.: Writing, for me, is an act of consciousness. It is a way of recognizing the power of words and confronting the histories and structures that shape human life. That awareness compels a responsibility—to witness, to testify, and to seek a form of release from the weight of history. To write is to pursue truth beyond the self. Writing, ultimately, is a form of freedom.

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

P.S.: I’m currently reading Fearless by Tracy K. Smith, Imagination: A Manifesto by Ruha Benjamin, and Vision and Difference by Griselda Pollock. I move between these and poetry collections.

As for film, the last two that stayed with me were Sinners and One Battle After Another.

20 - What are you currently working on?

P.S.: I’m currently working on three projects: a poetry collection I’m revising, Port of Sorrow; an essay collection on Haitian poets under review with Bloomsbury; and a collection of short stories, some of which have already appeared in literary journals.

I tend to move between projects. When one form resists me, I shift into another—entering, as I think of it, a different house of language.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Anna Veprinska

Anna Veprinska is the author of Empathy in Contemporary Poetry after Crisis. She was a finalist in the Ralph Gustafson Poetry Contest, has been shortlisted for the Austin Clarke Prize in Literary Excellence and received an Honourable Mention from the Memory Studies Association First Book Award. She is an assistant professor in the Department of English at the University of Calgary.

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 collection of poems, Sew with Butterflies, was the realization of a dream. I was so young when it was published, and I knew nothing about publishing, except that a publisher (Steel Bananas) had heard me give a reading and asked if I had a collection I could submit. Their belief in me at that stage meant everything. The book that emerged held, at the heart of it, that moment of humility: that my poems had spoken to another human being. It was frightening and filling and fuelling.

Bonememory, my forthcoming second collection of poems, took a long time to write – or at least to arrive at writing. Although I published two chapbooks in between, Bonememory is set to appear about 10 years after my first collection. I needed that time to grow and believe in myself as a poet, and I think Bonememory represents that growth – it holds the poems I feel most proud of.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
In another interview, I’ve written about how at seven years old I asked my father for a notebook and began writing poems. I can’t explain this in any other way, except to say that poetry came to me, not I to it. I wrote it before I understood what it was – I am still trying to understand what it is.

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 a slow writer. Excruciatingly slow. In conversation with my creative writing students, I’ve been championing the slow writer, the non-prolific writer, the ‘I-just-moved-a-comma-today’ writer. But I’ve also been reminding them that writing takes place off the page as much as it does on the page – I am constantly thinking about and in poetry.

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 think my writing fits into both of those descriptions. Bonememory began as individual poems whose patterns I later traced and pieced into a collection, as did Sew with Butterflies. But the new project I’m working on began with an idea for a collection, which each of the poems is moving toward.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Even after all these years of reading my poetry aloud, I still get nervous before and exhausted after readings. It’s a kind of exposure (in both uncomfortable senses of vulnerability and publicity). But I do enjoy readings, especially when they allow me to connect with others in the audience; I deeply appreciate conversations after a reading. To hear how a poem landed is a 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?
In Bonememory, the questions I am working with are about how memory is held in our bones and what that means personally, familialy, intergenerationally, collectively. While I was writing many of the poems in Bonememory, I was simultaneously working on a postdoctorate project that centred around listening to Holocaust testimonies. And I was also watching and reading about horrific world events, including Russia’s invasion of my home country of Ukraine, and, here in Canada, the findings of unmarked graves at former residential schools. These violences are part of the questions, too, as are my own limits as a viewer of these violences and the potentially nefarious tentacles of empathy.

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?
Dionne Brand described Inventory, her 2006 long poem about the socio-political crises at the turn of this century, as an “antenna of the time.” In my own writing, I am often drawn to responding to the cultural and political moments we live in (when I can stomach writing about them, and that often takes time) and to ethics. But I don’t think that needs to be the role of the writer, especially if it doesn’t feel honest for that individual writer. I think it’s dangerous to prescribe a role for any artist.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I am so often a solitary writer, but I think working with an editor is a remarkable and imperative opportunity. My editor for Bonememory at the University of Calgary Press’s Brave and Brilliant Series, Helen Hajnoczky, was wonderful – attentive, honest, thoughtful. She offered care not only to each individual poem but also to the collection as a whole. It’s a gift to receive that kind of attention – it makes the work stronger. When I published my chapbook Stone Blossom with Anstruther Press, Jim Johnstone was likewise incredible, which I knew he would be from working with him as a mentor through Arc Poetry Magazine’s Writer-in-Residence mentorship program. Jim helped select the poems that became Stone Blossom and read each with a keen and honest eye. I am deeply indebted to the editors who have made my poems stronger.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
I once heard a writer say, paraphrasing Lynda Barry, that one should touch the work every day. I like the spaciousness the word “touch” allows: you can shift a dash; you can move a word from one line to another. Touching the work keeps it close to you, keeps it breathing inside of you.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
My academic work means I am constantly moving between poetry and critical prose. I am at my best when I am merging the two. But, honestly, I think what I know best is how to write poetry, and I’ve learned to pass it off as prose.

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?
Most of the time, I don’t have a routine so much as a commitment. In the “my (small press) writing day” essay I previously wrote for you some years back, I speak of my writing day as an attempt to reach for the magic of poetry. That commitment to reach for poetry can look like dedicated writing time, but it can also look like reading or watching a sunset. There are periods when I have more of a set writing routine, and there are periods when I come to writing when it calls me. I work at not being too hard on myself during the routine-light times, but I am happiest when I am writing.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Other words. The writing of other writers reminds me what can be done with language. Also, moving away from the project – allowing the time it needs to awaken again – is part of the writing: this can look like walking, reading, listening to music, staring out a window.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
The smell of my sweetheart.

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?
All of the above. A sound can lead to a poem. Or a smell. Or a brush stroke. Or science – I recently wrote a poem about a blue whale’s heart. I am especially enamoured of light, “a certain slant of light,” as Emily Dickinson wrote.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Oh, this is a huge question, because there are so many – poets and otherwise! Paul Celan has had an enormous influence on my writing – both my approach to language and my approach to the silences around and within language. Other writers that are indispensable for me include: Emily Dickinson, Anne Carson, Toni Morrison, Ilya Kaminsky, Ocean Vuong, Dionne Brand, Wisława Szymborska, Valzhyna Mort, Zadie Smith, and Rainer Maria Rilke.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I’d like to write more creative nonfiction and, perhaps someday, even fiction. But mostly I feel that I love poetry too much to stray far from it for long.

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 professor, which I am fortunate to be, and which allows me to write and be inspired by the writing of my students. Alternatively, a psychologist: I am interested in the inner thoughts occupying (tormenting?) people’s minds, in what’s underneath the surface. I think a psychologist and a writer have this in common.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Was it Elie Wiesel who said one should only write if they could not live without writing? That’s why I write.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I recently read Elizabeth Rosner’s Third Ear: Reflections on the Art and Science of Listening, which was published last year. It’s a compassionate and thoughtful nonfiction book in which Rosner beautifully threads together personal narrative with science, art, and theory. I had the pleasure of listening to it as an audiobook read by Rosner.

I’ve been watching some wonderful world cinema. I particularly love Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love. It’s visually stunning, and there is so much power in what remains unsaid in this film.

20 - What are you currently working on?
I am working on a new collection of poems through a Calgary Institute for the Humanities Fellowship: the poems are about the tension between my intolerance to noise (I have auditory sensitivity) and my reliance on sound (I often rely on auditory accommodations). It’s a collection that challenges me to work with and through sound.

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;