Antony, tell us about your new poetry collection Bugs published by Carcanet OxfordPoets. What inspired you to write on this theme?

An accident, honestly. After I’d finished and delivered my second book, Flying Fish, I wrote a clutch of poems that happened to feature insects – just three or four – and somehow got it into my head that Bugs would be a great title for a book. And after that, everything I wrote somehow had to fit that title. So it ended up being a real slog – as the seven year gap between Flying Fish and Bugs attests. So it’s full of poems featuring insects, illnesses and spyware. But the bugs, of whatever kind, are meant to stand for all the things we feel afraid of, or guilty about. It’s not just a book of poems about beetles.

There seem to be a lot of challenges for new poets. As well as compiling reputable publishing track records they’re encouraged to earn themselves a reputation through various literary competitions/awards before seeking publication of their collections. As a winner of an Eric Gregory Award (2000) how would you say that’s affected your writing career? Do you have any advice for poets seeking publication?

The Eric Gregory Award is fabulous. It’s for poets under the age of 30 and there’s some cash in it for the winners. It’s valuable in two ways – publishers do take note of who the winners are every year, and it’s good to get onto the radar of the finest poetry editors in the country. But just as importantly, it’s a genuine boost to the confidence of young writers. Writing can be a lonely pursuit when you’re starting out, and it’s hard to know if what you’re doing is actually any good, so the encouragement poets feel at winning a Gregory is immense. I’d already published my first book, Pilots and Navigators, by the time I won my Gregory, but it was still a wonderful moment. Being at the awards party, hobnobbing with some of my heroes like Dannie Abse and Hugo Williams, and being handed a cheque by Beryl Bainbridge, who whispered in my ear, “But you’re a mere child,” was unforgettably brilliant.

Advice for poets seeking publication? Read a lot. Read everything. All the contemporary poetry you can get your hands on. And don’t forget to explore the history of our poetry – the Gawain poet, Chaucer, Marvell, Wordsworth, Browning, Tennyson, Eliot. You know – everything. You’re writing out of a long tradition, like it or not, and for the sake of your own poems you need to know where and how you fit.

Enter competitions. Send your poems to magazines – www.poetrymagazines.org.uk has a pretty good list of what’s out there. Get a thick skin. There’s plenty of rejection on its way – which, incidentally, doesn’t stop when you’ve published a handful of books. But again, editors at the major publishing houses keep an eye on what’s going on in the poetry magazines. They notice if a name keeps cropping up.

And don’t get into it for the money. There isn’t any.

You currently deliver workshops and seminars for the Poetry School. Could you tell us a bit about what you do for the Poetry School and how you got involved?

For the last eight years I’ve been living in York, where I’ve run Small Group workshops, meeting once a month for eight months at a time. A group of five or six people get together, and I lead them through a process of reading and discussing each other’s work. It’s a way of examining their poems really rigorously, but in a very supportive environment. It’s been a privilege to be involved – particularly to watch some of the members of my groups go on to publish pamphlets and full-length collections of poems, and to find some poems in there that I recognize from the group’s sessions. I moved to Leeds about a year ago, and I’m still running a group in York, and planning to start a new group here. Anyone interested?

Do you feel it’s important to take an active role in the literary community? You’re currently based in Leeds – what do you think of the local literary scene?

Yes, it’s important. At least, it’s important to me. It won’t make anyone a greater writer to be in the thick of local literary activity, but it certainly fends off the isolation. I put a lot of effort into creating events in York over the years that I lived there, because I wanted the literary community to experience real excellence – to have the best poets visit the city – and to make that a focus for all the people of the area who love literature or were trying to find a way in to literature.

I also wanted to give developing local writers a platform to perform – to raise their game in front of real, paying audiences. And The Poetry School gave me an ideal forum for achieving that. We had some great live events. Sadly, I’ve not been in Leeds long enough to have wormed my way properly into the literary scene here, but I certainly get the feeling that there are loads of energetic younger people getting things done in the city.

I was really interested to read that you have taken part in a number of international tours and translation projects. Could you tell us how this came about?

I got an e-mail from someone in Budapest, back in 2002, I think, inviting me to read there to a poetry society he ran. We’d been at university together, so he’d been following my writing. And we got some help with the expenses from the British Council. At the time, the BC office in Budapest was very keen to do more poetry events, and they encouraged me to put together a group of British poets for an extended visit the next year. So I gathered up a bunch of poets around my own age – Polly Clark, Matthew Hollis, Clare Pollard and Owen Sheers, with whom I’d toured around the UK in 2001 – and we went. We did a lot of readings and ran a lot of workshops in schools and universities, and then we were taken off to a place called The Translators’ House, on the banks of Lake Balaton, with a group of five Hungarian poets. We spent a few days starting a mutual translation project, which we continued back in the UK some time later. Around the same time, the BC in Croatia were looking for a group of British poets to join an annual touring poetry festival, so the five of us must have seemed like a reliable fit.

And projects in Israel and China followed on from that, both organised by Polly Clark. There are diaries from the Hungary, Croatia and Israel projects on my website. We published a small book of translations afterwards, and we’ve all contributed to a new anthology of Hungarian poetry in translation, edited by George Szirtes, called New Order: Hungarian Poets of the Post 1989 Generation, which is published early in 2010, I think.

Who would you cite as your main literary influences? Is there any one that you currently find exciting?

I’ve been very lucky to have known some poets personally, who were kind enough to spend time helping me with my writing; Nigel Forde and Bernard O’Donoghue in particular. The first poets whose work I loved were the Mersey poets, Ted Hughes and Thom Gunn, then Andrew Motion’s Love in a Life, Seamus Heaney, Kathleen Jamie, Jo Shapcott, Coleridge, Edward Thomas and, probably most of all, Norman MacCaig. Michael Symmons Roberts, Colette Bryce. It’s bad making a list, because I’m conscious of all the people I’m leaving out. There are too many.

Most exciting currently? Again, loads, but to pull four out of the air, the Faber New Poets, who’ve all just had pamphlets published by Faber and Faber. They’re Fiona Benson, Toby Martinez de las Rivas, Heather Phillipson and Jack Underwood. I saw them read at the Ilkley Literature Festival this year, and it was really exciting. Brilliant.

Could you talk us through your writing process (if you have a typical writing process)?

Chewing my pen, making coffee, procrastinating in every way I can. I always use Moleskine notebooks and Muji .38mm pens, which I mention whenever I can in the hope that they’ll send me freebies. I tend to write better in the morning, for some reason, but I don’t have a typical process. Trains seem to be quite good places to make rough drafts of poems.

Now that you’ve published Bugs have you got any other upcoming projects?

I’m trying to write a new play at the moment. But otherwise, the next project is just to write the next poem. That feels like enough to be getting on with. And I’m definitely not going to be saddling myself with a new title for the next book.

You’re currently Head of Communications at Yorkshire Dance. How do you balance your day job with all your writing commitments?

Badly, I expect. In the end, the real wrestling match is trying to find time for the writing itself. Even if I didn’t have a full time job outside writing, it would be all too easy to spend every waking moment teaching, touring and performing. Sometimes you just need some empty time and space to disappear with a notepad and a pen. Every now and then I’ll disappear with one of my close friends, who’s also a poet, into the countryside for a few days. We have a strict routine of writing in the morning, then going for a long walk in the afternoon, then going to the pub. That seems to work pretty well. We last did it this May, when we went to Dymock – the village in Gloucestershire where Robert Frost and Edward Thomas spent a lot of time just before the First World War, and hung out with other poets like Rupert Brooke. I got four poems written during our three days there, which would normally take me six months.

For further information on Antony Dunn and his current projects see the links below:

http://www.antonydunn.org

http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=authC2D9C28A0f36029A82SvWwE8E077

Poetry by Antony Dunn:

The Electric Theatre

Mrs McGrath has scalded her lip

on the lip of her penny tea

which makes her think how hot on the brow

of her battle-dressed boy, how hot

her home-coming kisses would be.

Mrs McGrath is down near the front

the better to see through the pom, pom

of cigarette smoke the face

of her boy in the Somme on the screen,

on the canvas the stretch of his limbs.

Mrs McGrath has packed her purse

with tickets for newsreels and the bus;

enough, she’s thinking now, to throw

into the air to ticker-tape him home

or confetti him a church-yard path.

Mrs McGrath is touching her tongue

to her blistered lip beneath the strafe

of still on still flung from the rear,

the jaunty let’s get this over with speed

of reels of everyone’s boys but her own.

Mrs McGrath is buttoning up

to file with the rest toward the front,

to press around the side and out

into a day that blows her shadow off

and throws it back onto the screen.

Mrs McGrath is twelve feet tall

to the line of women in the dark

and seems, almost, between two wars.

They can not see her blistered lip.

How she touches it with her tongue.

Wall to Wall

O, at this time of closing in

the dark and advent streets

theirs is a silent wailing wall

to beat their prayers against.

Their sleepless ambulances hold

their votive lights aloft

against the lengthening of stones

and can not enter in.

O, at this time of drawing in

how deep and dreamless we

through all that we are sleeping through;

the City’s fiat lux

and how they come and wreath our streets

and how our sirens reach

our people in good time through gates

through walls thrown open wide.

from The Hill of the Muses

This is how I take you with me;

by saying to the empty seat

beside me, Look! how orange is

the sun above the sea. Now squint

to squeeze its circle from the glare.

And look! over your shoulder, how

the Parthenon squares up to it

and whelms itself with orange light,

before the sun, the heat and you

and I all go down together.

I take it you are lost for words

through pines and aloe vera to

the streetlights and the orange trees

as I watch your steps and wonder,

What d’you think? What d’you make of that?

Cadaverine Magazine 2009