Your work combines a kind of witty localism with a much broader social and scientific outlook. How much of an influence is a poet like Simon Armitage?

I think what poets like Simon Armitage and Tony Harrison showed me was that great poetry and important messages could and indeed should come from the North, from around where I live. It's all very well sat in an ivory tower wearing out quills discussing big concepts like Love, or Freedom but I think that, to have any real relevance, those concepts need to be couched in a very human, and a very real place. Harrison wrote brilliantly on the class-struggles of the 1980's and the destruction which the Thatcher years imposed on places like Leeds and Barnsley, but he did it with a very human, witty face. So I think ideas like that have certainly had an influence on me. Poetry is certainly there to challenege broader and social scientific outlooks but, its like that old poetry saying: If you try writing about life you will come up against a brick wall, if you try writing about a brick wall you might just end up saying something new about life... I think Armitage, Harrison, Geoff Hattersly and all the other great Northern Poets of our time really showed me that writing about the Brick Walls of Barnsley was just as noble a way to pursue the bigger questions as any other

 

There's that famous quote by Shelley about "poets being the real legislators". Does poetry still feasibly have the power or relevance to legislate for anything meaningful?

 

I think that, if anything, poetry needs to fight back against what is legislated; it needs to be supra-political. Politics and poetry, contrary to what many people would believe, are intrinsically intertwined. Poetry is at it's most powerful when it is not legislating, but when it is protesting. The very act of reading a dissenting poem is a political act, the very act of reciting or writing a poem which questions the status-quo becomes something which is very political.

Poetry certainly needs politics; and in a very real, if perhaps slightly pretentious, way, politics does need poetry. There is a famous quote by Rita-Ann Higgins, which Selima Hill uses to preface one of her books, in which she says that:

"To get to the poetic truth, it is not always necessary to tell the what actually happened truth..."

The poetic truth is often a lot more enduring, a lot more meaningful, once the actual events have passed. Milton's poetic truth on the English Revolution endures more than the what actually happened truth. It's interesting that, in the 'Credit Crunch' or the recession or whatever it is that's going on at the moment, people have been sending poems in to the BBC, and I also noticed that there is now even a poetry competition looking for entries about Debt and related topics. Poetry seems to be more relevant than ever, in 'MCing', in Poetry Slams, in rap, poetry, and certainly the spoken word form, is becoming a more and more popular way in which to dissent from the popular opinion.

Someone or other famous once said that after Austwich, it was barbaric to write poetry. I disagree. Austwich, the war in Iraq, Somalia, genocide in Darfur, are all reasons why poetry matters, why poetry needs to be relevant. Whether or not we ever get anywhere depends on more people picking up a poetry book and reading it; taking part in that wonderfully political act of reading, and learning, and thinking.

Speaking of Milton. Doesn't his message of freedom from arbitrary power - Miltonic freedom, bear particular relevance today?

I think that a struggle for Freedom, politcal, existential or otherwise, can be found in the poetry of every generation. Freedom is a vitally pertinent matter in society today; ID Cards, a D.N.A database, the incarceration of people without trial all bring the question of our Liberty and Freedom to the forefront. Yet to me this Civic Freedom, Miltonic Freedom if you will, must be seperated from the Poet's Freedom. The notion of the poet being above society, of being seperate, of being free from the world through virtue of artistic merit. Thom Gunn, a hero of mine, believed that a poet must be of society, but also above it. This is not a particular type of Freedom which I think has all that much relevance today. Poetry must be free from restraint, from rules, from the constricting corsetry of stuffiness and antiquated forms, that sort of cultural Freedom, of quasi-Bohemia, is very necessary and very important to me, yet the supposed Freedom of the poet from civic society if not a notion which I have much time for. Poets have a civic responsibility, a responsibility to fight erosions of liberty, to question the Status-Quo and to enhance society as best they can. Poetic and Creative Freedom induces brilliance, but, there is a danger that Freedom from society could simply induce negligence and the cliche's of poets in their Ivory Towers rather than existing at street level

 

Has the recent proliferation of Writing Courses helped young writers find space to develop their work, or do they promise something they can't offer?

 

Well, I am currently enrolled in one, so I guess I have to defend them to a certain degree. I think what Creative Writing classes can offer people is a chance to immerse themselves in a creative environment; bounce ideas off each other, read out their work, share their ideas and help each other overcome whatever challenges may arise. This, of course, is not a new idea, it is the same as Virginia Wolf and Eliot's Bloomsbury group of writers in the early part of the the 20th century, or the deep friendship between Ginsberg, Kerouac and the other Beat poets, that sort of bond between writers, battling the same things at the same time, is not new- its just now we pay £3000 a year for the privilege. However, whilst I do believe wholeheartedly in Creative Writing courses, there’s are a couple of points which should be made:

Firstly, I don't really believe that Creative Writing courses can really do anything other than nurture, help and shape a talent which is already there, in the same way that a Car Mechanics course or a Fine Art class would induce in me neither road-worthy maintenance skills or the requisite talent to be an artist. In that sense, Creative Writing is kind of unteachable, you cant give someone a list of five bullet points and say that thats how a poem should be, or thats how to write a short story; the main way creative writing courses can teach is through discussion and debate and through creating the space you suggest in which young writers can develop their work.

Secondly, there does seem to be a theme of courses being offered which are straight Creative Writing (My own is English Literature with Creative Writing, with a 75% bias towards the former). The notion that Creative Writing can exist without being in dialogue with literature that has already been written seems to me to be absurd. You only become a good writer by being a promiscuous reader thus, for me, twinning any Creative Writing course I was going to take with English Literature seemed to be vital and necessary.

In terms of Creative Writing promising what cannot be delivered, perhaps some young people are lured in by the success stories, by dreams of six-figure advances and movie adaptations of the novella thats been in a shoe-box under their bed since they were 13, but anybody who goes into writing for the money and for the glory aren't really a Writer, are they?

 

Being 'a writer' is an interesting concept. How far removed is being a 'writer' from say being a poet? Are they one in the same? Or is poetry not even necessarily verbal, in the Coleridgean sense?

 

I guess I should narrow down the perimeters of 'Writer'; we're all writers when we make a shopping list, or chat over Facebook. People are writing out loud everytime they have conversations with each other; what, for me, separates this type of Writing which is all around us, from the spheres of Poetry and Literature is, the Coleridgean idea that he put forward when suggesting:

"A poem,combines words differently, because it is seeking to do something different".

Of course, subsequent decades have meant we can substitute novel into the sentence instead of poem; Virginia Wolf, for example, famously combining words differently in her search to do something different, to "make it new" as Ezra Pound demanded.

For me poetry, and the 'Writing' which everybody is engaged in everyday in conversations, text messages and emails are intrinsically intertwined. Often, I will be taken by a particular phrase someone says, and a very simple, oft short poem, will be born from it. The other day in a taxi, the driver turned around to me and said that:

"Jazz is just musical masturbation"

I thought that was such a brilliant line that I wrote it down as soon as I got out and I've been trying to work it into a poem every since; perhaps I won't be able to, in many ways its a poem in itself; this guy was writing poetry out loud whilst he was driving me into town.

To answer the second part of your question, I think that all poetry is verbal by sheer necessity. A poets voice, whether or not they are a performer or simple reader of their work, adds a new dimension to their words. Everyone should read poetry outloud, to get the rhythm and the cadence of the verse. People seem embarrassed to do this, but there should be a room in every library where people can just sit and read poetry aloud to each other. The writing we all do every day in our lives rarely ends up on paper, so why should the purest form of writing, poetry, merely be confined to the page?

Cadaverine Magazine 2009