Thank you for taking the time to be interviewed for the blog.
First off, tell us a bit about yourself...
I am a poet and literary translator based in Suffolk, though I spend time abroad, usually in Belgium and France, because I translate poets and writers from those countries as well as to a lesser extent Germany and Austria. I also write essays, as I find this is the literary medium which best suits my work.
I am currently writing a series of essays about Belgium called ‘The Undisclosed Anatomy of Belgium’, in which I am seeking via a sort of travelogue / psycho geographic exploration, to reveal and unearth aspects of Belgian culture which are overlooked here in the UK. I feel Belgium is a blind spot, a black hole in our cultural awareness, but it was once and still is in some respects the crossroads of Europe culturally speaking, with German, French and Dutch influences. I publish essays with a number of journals and I also write reviews, mostly for the TLS but also the London Magazine and other publications. I am also a photographer and I tend to include my own b/w images in my books wherever possible and also for the covers. Both my Salt books and those with Hesperus Press all bear my own work.
You are the only poet appearing at the Felixstowe Book Festival this year, do you feel any pressure as the sole representative of poetry over the weekend?
Not really, I see all literary activity as of equal merit if it is good and no discipline has supremacy over another. I don’t subscribe to the elitism of poetry per se as the fabled ‘source’ of literature, or say novels over short stories and essays, everything is much more variegated now and chaotically diverse.
You can experience more poetry listening to the acerbic delivery of a mournfully inspired presenter such as Charlie Brooker, or listening to certain lyrics in music than reading many of the poems regularly published today, many of which are not poems at all but merely changelings, that look like poems but actually on closer inspection are found to not be the real thing
I have always admired the poet writer or the poet painter over just the painter or the writer, someone like the currently posthumously idolized WG Sebald for example, is essentially a poet writing prose, as was Robert Walser whom he admired, as was Thomas Bernhard whom he also admired. These men were writing prose and pushing its limits, because they could express themselves more completely in it than in the medium of poetry, which had been their starting point. They had quickly exhausted poetry as a channel.
Having now removed the splinters from my flesh caused by the sudden
collapse of my soapbox, I must confess I have a responsibility of a kind I must confess I have a responsibility of a kind as the sole flag bearer for poetry at Felixstowe’s important opening festival and I hope that I can acquit myself well and that my work is appreciated by whoever has the resolve to attend my reading.
You've appeared at numerous literature festivals previously, what do you enjoy most about reading your poetry in public?
Not all poets like to read their poems, and like drivers there are those who are naturals and take to the road without thinking, as if the car were an extension of their body, and those who drive but don’t really enjoy it and remain a nervous passenger despite being at the wheel.
I do enjoy the chance to read, since it’s like revisiting your poems through a back door, taking the tradesman’s entrance and thereby surprising them. You come upon them anew when you hear your own voice reading them, and they tend to breathe in a way they do not when you write them originally and they are set heavily on the page connecting with eyes only.
Reading is an art and takes practice but also sensitivity, and a certain timing. It can be very satisfying to feel an audience waiting on your next line, or even applauding after a poem, but an unknown audience is like a wayward fish which must be landed, you have to judge the tautness of the line so it does not break…every audience is different and the place you are in makes an enormous difference too, as does the way you are introduced.
A reading is above all a performance but however good the performance, it is in the end the content that matters. No amount of peripheral tinkering can hide the fact that the poetry itself must stand up.
What inspires you to write poetry?
I cannot really adequately answer this question, its like asking, what inspires you to breathe…or what inspires you to put the empty milk bottles out. It is something that has to be done, there is no conscious decision to pick up a pen and a notebook.
There is a certain tension which happens to afflict the mind and the logical alleviating mechanism is to express through words a fragmented image of this inwardness in an attempt to make it more bearable, the existential motor if you like is forever functioning in the poet, always threatening to overheat, while in most people it is simply shut off through a system of diversion so they can get on with their lives. They have it rather easier I would say, but people always imagine poets are exotic mysterious creatures whose lives are exciting and unconventional when in fact they are often alienated, depressed and suffering greatly, because they simply have a skin too few…and cannot protect themselves from their own lethal idealism. One thinks of one of our greatest modern poets who was in fact a songwriter and musician, Nick Drake, in this respect, a textbook case.
As a (sometime) Suffolk based poet, what do you think that this new literature festival can bring to Felixstowe and Suffolk?
I was really pleased when I heard about this literary festival starting in Felixstowe, as I am fond of this town which I visit regularly, and which I think is a very underrated place with an authenticity and ambiance of a certain Englishness more common to a past era. Felixstowe now appeals to me more than the other more well known heavily visited towns along the coast further north such as Southwold and Aldeburgh in the area where I live, which have become gentrified seaside retreats shorn of atmosphere, especially Southold, which has recently lost all its bookshops and in the last two years been invaded by chain retailers and up market London clothes boutiques.
Felixstowe on the other hand still has two of the best second hand bookshops in the east of England. The cultural health of a town used to be delineated by its bookshops.
I think the festival will draw in some people to Felixstowe who may be surprised, and will be good for the town to have some sort of writerly infusion for a couple of days. However my great fear is that once the wave of gentrification has sated itself on other more obvious places it may turn its sights on this unexploited town. The last thing the nicely mixed population of Felixstowe needs is an influx of four by fours and Mercedes estates. For then it will just end up like everywhere else, a façade equating to suburban expectations but with nothing behind it…looking the part but mourning its squandered soul. But the festival can only enhance the life of the town and serve to sweep out any remaining dusty corners for a few days…
Please could you share your favorite poem (of your own) to feature on the blog?
I don’t have a favourite poem, but here is a small airborne one people seem to favour…and another with a Suffolk bias.
STRAGGLERS
The sunflowers still face east in death.
No-one has told them
their bleached fronds are hanging broken.
Perhaps a bird’s weight will help draw them
gradually to the ground.
No-one shall come and admire them,
or spontaneously decide to steal them,
rushing back to the car with their looted flame.
Only a few drab pheasant hens and partridges
bark feebly around their husks.
The whole field has discovered perfection
in giving up.
All will fall by December, scythed by frost.
Massed grey limbs will litter the patch,
empty seed heads upturned who stare
at that milky socket where a beleaguered sun
fumes uselessly in the traps.
Even as they go down and before the final
humiliation of the plough,
a few last seeds might creep away,
heroic stragglers who somehow brave
the ebony machinery of rooks.
THE SWIFTS
Powered by screams
and the black bat twist of their wings,
they slice through the insect cloud.
Heavenly dogfight, no quarter given,
the plunder ravished unseen.
Round they come again,
cyclists on a bend
clinging to their manic carousel.
The air cannot hold them.
The sun slips from their sleek
gunmetal backs.
They are gods.
Will Stone will appear on Saturday 15th June at Felixstowe library between 2.45 - 3.30pm.
Tickets cost £3 and can be purchased online here
