My father, an English Literature lecturer who loves poetry, used to whisper 'rhymes' into my baby ear to keep me quiet in public places. Rhythm and cadence are my absolute ground-bass in poetry, and the things I need to fight hardest against, in the struggle to avoid cliché and self-satisfaction.
Youthful enthusiasms, etc.
The Romantic lyric – I still have by heart 'Kubla Khan' (Colerdige), 'Ode
to a nightingale' (Keats) and e.g. Shelley's 'To --------' ("One word is too
often profaned for me to profane it / One feeling too falsely disdained for
me to disdain it ..."). Robert Frost's shorter poems. Ted Hughes's
Crow was probably the first whole book by a living British
writer that I cared about; I was 16 by then. John Donne, the 17th century
'Metaphysical', at A-level was pretty formative, I suspect (far more than the
Wordsworth we also did). I was mad about T.S. Eliot's 'The Waste Land'.
The complex technicalities of Gerard Manley Hopkins might have stiffened
me usefully if I'd paid them any attention but I just loved the noise his poems
made.
Education
At Oxford I studied an absolutely conservative mainstream English literary canon,
and I'm afraid I loved it. I got Yeats and Browning indelibly
under my skin, but what I was most into was drama,
academic and practical. The tendency towards a rather self-dramatising personal
voice was probably hard-wired in at that point. Another thing to struggle against!
Recent
I know what I like – but not really what determines the ways I write. Paul
Muldoon has long been my 'favourite poet'. His boundless inventiveness,
dense allusion, formal virtuosity and experimentalism in blending rich rural
roots with brilliant urban hip are completely seductive. The enthusiasm can't
(I trust) make a fool of me since there's nothing of him I can think to imitate
except his outrageous rhymes. I relate to Sean O'Brien's rhythmic locomotive
but can't match his hard political vision, and there's arguably an ineluctable
maleness there, likewise with some of the so-called 'New Generation' poets,
especially Don Paterson, whose confident work I find sometimes dazzling
if also rather unpleasant (in common with some of the clever male fiction around
since the 1980s). I wish I liked more poems by women. In recent years I've especially
enjoyed the American Amy Clampitt (I envy her glorious volubility) and
Alice Oswald (her charged, slightly mystical originality). But I can't
be like them either. I have undoubtedly picked up some turns of phrase from
poets I know well and work/workshop with, especially Jane Draycott.
Present
Now I'm bored with almost everything I know, and most of all with myself. In
the last few years I've been trying to come to terms with less mainstream work.
I'm trying to get influenced by modernist-based traditions that emphasise poetry
as language, rejecting referentiality and emotional expressiveness as ends –
but old habits die hard ... . I've been working with constraints and processes,
and also looking in the visual arts for new
ways of thinking about writing, by analogy. I love the books of typographer
and designer Colin Sackett, who fascinatingly explores ways of arranging
words in a very clean, minimal aesthetic style, and the electronic experiments
of John Cayley, who uses a computer to automate transformations of text,
influenced by the French OuLiPo group (stands for Ouvrier de la litterature
potentielle), who are as interested in mathematics as in poetry, and who experiment
with writing according to very strict constraints. There are less drastic-looking
alternatives in this country too: I've long enjoyed the quiet fastidious work
of Thomas A. Clark; the breadth of Edwin Morgan's
poetic practice is exemplary. (These two are Scots: in Scotland there seems
to be much greater openness between mainstream and alternative / experimental
practices.) Widening my reading, I'm glad to find there are some women I can
study: Out of everywhere : linguistically innovative poetry by women in North
America & the UK (Reality Street, 1996) is a kind of primer to me at present.
I am also involved in a tutelary (to me) poetic collaboration, or exchange,
by e-mail with the poet Frances Presley.