Poetry Live!

One of the best things about these days are the questions asked by pupils. They add a great sense of spontaneity to the day and the poets love answering, especially when they are a little close to the line. Here is a selection of questions and answers which may be interesting and useful.

Why did you decide not to give titles to some of your poems?
Some of the poems don't have titles because they are taken from a longer sequence and the sequence has a title but each section doesn't. But there are other occasions when it comes to titles that I just can't be bothered. I feel as if I have done all the hard work in the actual poem. It's the body of the text that is the thing that I am committed to. Occasionally titles are useful because you can spin off them or you can achieve some kind of frission or polarity between the title and the actual text. But every now again, whatever you think of just takes something away from the poem rather than adding something to it. So it feels good once a while just to call a poem 'poem'. It's like banging a nail into the wall to hang a picture on. It's just functional.

Is it frustrating when people interpret your poems inappropriately?
I don't know because I'm not usually around when people are reading the poems. It seems to me that poems exist so that people can respond to them in whatever way they want. I don't write poems for an exam board, it just so happens that they are used by the exam board for the purpose of teaching literature.

I like it when poems remind people of things that have happened in their own lives, which I can't have any control over at all as the writer. I suppose what you are trying to do in a poem is to recreate a sensation in the reader. That is something that isn't about interpretation. It's about sensations and it's about feelings.

But no, it doesn't bother me at all.

How old are your poems?
That ís a very poetic question. How old are my poems? They're not as old as my shoes and they are a bit younger than my teeth.

In the poem 'November', who is John?
I have used the word 'John' in the way that in America you might use the word 'Joe' and it means everybody. It means anybody. It's an every man person.

To me, it has an honest sound, an earthy quality. I've always wanted a friend called John. So, when I couldn't have one, I just invented one and put him in a poem.

In the poem 'It Ain't What You Do It's What It Does To You' , are you suggesting that the experiences that you've had are more valuable than the experience you haven't had?
What I'm trying to suggest in that poem is that you don't need to have had all these fantastic experiences in your life to be able to, a) write poems and, b) engage as a human being in the process of life. You were also asking about the language in the poem. To me the language of the way I describe things that I haven't done is both exotic and sarcastic at the same time.

So maybe I am deriding those experiences somewhat, maybe I'm deriding people that brag about the things that they've done or simply write about wild and exotic things which I don't think is the substance of poetry.

I think feeling and emotion is the substance of poetry and I think you can obtain and engage with that emotion just through everyday living.

Do you prefer to write faster poems with a poem or more traditional poems?
I think one thing you need to remember is that a day like this is quite a rare event. It's a shame but poetry readings aren't part of everyday life. The way that most people come across poetry is in books. And when you are reading a book it is a more contemplative, meditative quiet experience. I think on those occasions, I prefer to write poems that have shorter lines which don't get up as much momentum and as much rhythm, because they are the poems of other people that I enjoy. Where you can hear the thinking rather that the speaking, but you know as I was saying before. At events like this it's good to read poems which have got a bit of a zip.

How do you decide on the structure of your poems?
That's a very interesting question. I suppose you have the idea of a poem and then subconsciously you know how much material there is. So you kind of wait in your mind and then it might be that some of the words come to you originally have a kind of rhythm or it might be that you start seeing patterns of rhyme in what you are writing down that suggest a form. Or sometimes you can be a little bit more perverse and you can decide 'I going to write a sonnet today' or 'I going to write a cestina today' or 'I'm going to write a haiku today' or I'm going to do something as a prose poem or 'I'm going do something in free verse and actually set yourself that as a task, like an exercise.

But mainly I think the form and the structure suggest themselves. You know, sometimes it's just chance. A rhyme will occur and you think 'I like that rhyme, I think I can use it, I'll put one of those words at the end of this line and those words at the end of the next.
It's a fairly mysterious process, really.

What is the meaning of the lines 'Don't believe me, please' in the poem, 'I am very bothered when I think...'?
My feeling about that poem is that it's written in a very particular voice and that the voice contains sarcasm and bravado. It's about somebody telling a story with a certain amount of swagger and like a lot of people when they try and use sarcasm, in doing so they actually reveal their true motive or the true nature of the incident.

I think in saying 'don't believe me' the person in the poem is trying to wave away this soppy reason or some explanation for his actions and I think I am trying to encourage you to see through that, to see through his waving away of this excuse, and that the actual excuse might be truer than he realises.

What made you become a poet?
I was interested in reading poems, but I think the reason that I've stuck with it is that I get a huge amount of pleasure in being allowed to say what I want, whenever I want. I don't want to sound like a big mouth who is just shouting things out all the time. But it is quite a rare occurrence in modern life when you get one person saying something that they actually mean, without any backbeat, without any accompaniment, without any management company, just one written down voice, somebody saying the things that they actually believe in. I think it's actually quite rare and it is that that attracts me to poetry as an art form and I know you could imagine that poetry would be old- fashioned but to me it's more relevant than its ever been. We're bombarded with noise, colour, rubbish coming at us from 360 degrees, 24 hours a day and it's hard to actually filter out the other stuff and get to a point of somebody actually saying something that they believe. I think that's what poetry offers, that's the opportunity that a poem offers.

Do you consciously use techniques like assonance and alliteration?
No. I don't think any poet in the world every uses assonance and alliteration on purpose.
But all of us train our musical ear . Poetry is music. It's musical language. Because we train ourselves, we read a lot of poetry. You can't be a poet unless you read other people's poetry. I have many faults but I know that I have a musical ear and its so entirely the sound that leads us to pick those words. Even internal rhymes. For example in the poem Catrin the words skate and dark have a sort of internal echo and that would have come to me in some sort of instinctive way

Do you write to a formula when you write your poems?
Very interesting question. No. I don't write to a formula at all. It's important for you to know that when you look at any alliteration or metaphors or what have you, nobody puts those in on purpose. But on the other hand I've read a lot of poetry and there are a lot of rhythms and tunes in my head which will support the language that I'm using when I write a poem. And sometimes I'll write down two lines and they rhyme. And then I think - lets see what happens to the next two. I let it happen. For example in the poem Cold Knapp Lake,in the last two lines......I love the rhyme 'water' and 'daughter'.... Because those two rhymed I allowed a sort of rhyme to take over the rest of it. I probably pushed it a bit. What happens is that I let the words speak to me and then perhaps I shape them a bit afterwards.

Is the war between parents and children damaging (perhaps thinking of the poem 'Catrin')?
No, I think it's incredibly important. When my daughter Catrin was a teenager she was completely terrible. She will admit it. She was at war with me on absolutely everything. A lot about politics and beliefs. They rebelled against me by keeping their bedrooms very untidy. I'm a very tidy person. The more untidy their bedrooms were, the more likely they were to have a row. And they needed a row. We all need a row because otherwise how are we ever going to grow up and leave home? You have to have these rows but at the end of it you become better friends. Today, we're the best of friends. I also think back to a letter I had from a poet - when I was going through hell with Catrin - who told me that the adolescents of the brilliant are forever stormy.

Are all your poems about yourself?
Every writer uses their own life, even if they pretend they don't because you don't know anything else really. But from that point of view, you then move out with your imagination to everybody's life. So as I've said I was on a train but that ís not the whole of my life that I am talking about. It's only a bit that I am putting in there I. I am on a train. I feel terrible because the news is horrible and I phone home to say 'God haven't you heard the news, isn't it awful? But in fact my imagination is with the people who are phoning that train at Paddington - and getting no answer. So I am very honest about the point of view of most of my poems but they are not really about my life. We have no other material but the life we live and the life we imagine that others live, too.

A lot of your poems are about relationships are about children and adults. Would say that your inspiration comes from your mother's generation or your daughter's?
Well it does help. If you're writing about, say, children, it does help to have been a child yourself. Because then you've got two points of view. So when I was a teenager, I was very horrid teenager and when I grew up I realised how horrid I was. But I only realised how bad I was when my own daughter was tricky to deal with... and I think nothing is more important in life than one's relationships and naturally the mother, daughter, father, son. Family is crucial and I don't think you can leave any of it out.

What does your daughter think of the poem 'Catrin'?
Well I don't think she cares because she is a writer herself now but she pretends that she is embarrassed. But that poem is not studied in Wales, where she lives. But she did meet a teacher once who said, 'Oh you're Catrin!' and then she told me she was embarrassed. But then what are mothers for if not to embarrass their daughters. I don't think she really means it. I think she's quite proud of it but she's not admitting it.

If you had any advice for young poets, what would it be?
Read, read, read! If you are a bookworm and you have a note pad you write your thoughts down in, that would be very like the lives of nearly all the poets you hear today. Nearly all of us were and are bookworms and always loved little notebooks and writing in them from the earliest age.

Is your family always your inspiration?
Well I don't think that there ís anything more important in the whole world, other than personal relationships. Obviously if you can have children that is an incredibly important connection, but I have got to say that in the early poems in this Anthology, the ones written a long time ago, when I was at home with the kids all the time, that's what I had to write about. Now, I travel a lot and don't have children at home, I write about many, many other subjects, so I suppose you could say it is daily life that is the main source of subjects for poetry.

How long does it take to write a poem and/or does it come naturally?
Well, the first bit comes naturally in other words you get excited about something and write a few words down and you have fun with the language, just think 'oh I like that word', or 'I like that phrase'. Anybody who has ever written anything that they were a bit proud of will understand what I mean by that. Or anybody who had heard a word that they rather like the sound of even if it's a daft word, like the name of a footballer or something, you still find the word in your head. My case is that there isn't a single human being ever born that doesn't love poetry. And I don't know what happens after that but I mean poetry is completely normal and natural, it's as natural as tapping your foot to a rhythm, there is absolutely nothing abnormal about poetry. I suppose if we didn't call it poetry you'd all agree that lines from songs, things people have said, linger in your head and they're beautiful.

So the answer to how long does it take to write a poem, well from that moment when I have words fizzing, and I'm enjoying them and writing them down. Once in a blue moon, maybe twenty minutes, more likely two or three days, with a morning, then put it away, fiddle with it in the evening and look at it again the next day. Once in a blue moon there will be a poem that takes ten years to sort out. Mostly two or three days.

What emotions did you feel when you wrote 'On the Train'?
Well just like everybody else, just like you when you heard it on the news, or when you saw things on television. A poet is only a person and it would take a very hard heart with a no imagination not to feel a terrible 'Oh my god, what if it were me?' 'What if it were my relation on that train - my father or my sister?' So I just felt like you did.

What is the significance of the word 'square' in the poem 'Catrin'?
That ís an interesting question. Catrin is the Welsh way of saying Catherine. I think that I say 'square' because I see the hospital as a great big block - a necessary but not very interesting block with square or oblong windows and square or oblong rooms. Everything is angular and scrubbed and not a bit like home. I think that is why I use the word 'square'. And also I think I am thinking of a wall. When you are pacing around a room, it's a square environmental blank, a white room with nothing in it. So I walked over to the window to see if there was anything to look at. Outside all I could see was people standing by traffic lights, red, amber and green, and cars moving and I thought that wasn't very interesting either. So it's about something being not like home. Scrubbed, square and blank.

Does your poetry reflect a yearning to return to the countries that you were born in?
MA Yes, I think I do have a yearning to go back to Pakistan and India. I have been a couple of times. I think that it's a loss that I wasn't more in touch with Pakistan when I was growing up and that I'd now like to make up for that. I don't feel wholly English - although I do feel largely English.

ID I think the whole the question does come up when you're young. Where do I belong, what am I, and that's when you start to ask those questions. Is there something back there that I should know about. Having been back to a culture like Bombay and being able to be between cultures, I'm able to now feel that there is this pleasure and joy of not being outside but between the cultures. And I think that's happening to many of us. There are millions of people in the world who are happily moving between. It isn't a feeling of loss. Maybe a feeling of advantage.

How often do you write poems?
ID I try and write something every day, even if it's just a line. It may not appear as a full poem. It may just be a line that I write on a train or in a taxi. I've got lots of lines written on the backs of envelopes or on bills. And sometimes that all comes together.

MA I don't quite manage to write every day.but I do try and write something every week. It often ends up in the bin and doesn't always become a poem. But I feel that if I try and write every week, them I'm creating the opportunity for something to happen.

Do you think we read too much into your poetry?
Yes and No.
It certainly isn't written to be analysed. When you write a poem you don't sit and think you're concocting some great puzzle that students will confounded by for centuries to come. It's not like that. You write a poem in all honesty. It's what you want to say. But I do think that poems are open to interpretation and to analysis because poems are very dense they use compacted clotted language and I think they lend do themselves to being unravelled and studied.

My guess is that behind your question is this moment that you have in the class sometimes where the teacher will say 'I think the poet meant this, this and this' and you're thinking 'I don't see how he could possibly meant all that.

It would be inhuman to have thought all those things' and to a certain extent that would be right. But when you're writing a poem you are in a sort of, a very kind of white heat and you are making these connections but you are doing it subconsciously and it sometime takes people like yourselves, the readers of the poems, to open a poem back up and to explore and find these things.

How long does it take you to write a poem? Do you dash poems off or are they crafted over a period of time?
Funnily enough even if I could dash them off I wouldn't want too because part of the joy of writing a poem is the rewriting and what you learn not only about the meaning of the poem but also about what words can do. So it is very pleasurable to take along time over a poem.

In my case it varies but the poems I've read today, which are all short pieces. i.e. they don't go over a page, would take me a week say, if I was at home and working everyday from about ten until three when I have to go and get my daughter from school. Four or five days working at that pace and I'd pretty much have the finished poem and then longer poems, poems that do go over the page or over more than one page you know would take an equivalent length of time. But no I would be almost superstitious if I wrote a poem quickly. I would think, 'Oh, I can't be any good'. I do rewrite a lot.

Where you do you get your ideas from? Are they all from personal experience?
They pretty much are. I think my poetry falls into two loose categories.

One is autobiography, poems written particularly about my childhood. And I seem as writer to be fascinated by school. I find schools, even when I was in them, strange places. You have these characters who are the teachers who, when you are a child, are wonderful and larger than life. This is particularly the case with a young child. You have to spend a huge amount of time with them. And then there are the children that you are in school with and all the dramas of those relationships. And then there are the buildings and the bells and the sounds. So I love writing about school.

And the other thing I write about, if it isn't myself, my own memory and my own life and loves, is people. I do like to write about characters like Salome or Elvis or Anne Hathaway or the disturbed boy in the school with the gold fish. I am fascinated by human behaviour.

These are the two areas that I largely write about. I don't so much write about places because I find when I go to places I love, whether it be the countryside or somewhere like New York, that I absolutely can't write about it. I haven't got the words. I just sort of go 'urr ... isn't that amazing'. My talent fails me before landscape or place, alas.

How much did your church upbringing have an effect on your poetry?
That's very perceptive of you. I had a Catholic background so the poem set in Mrs Tilcher's Class was set in St Austin's Roman Catholic Primary School. I went with my four brothers. Obviously with my name I have got quite an Irish background. And then I went to convent school. But the convent school was a very strange environment that closed when I was in the fourth form. It decided to turn itself into a old people's home. I think there was more money in it for the nuns. And then I went to a normal girls' grammar school. So, religion in the early part of my life, up to about the age of fourteen, really was there. I'm now a sort of benevolent agnostic.

Is the poem 'Valentine' to do with your life and experiences?
Well I didn't give that poem to anyone in my life, and I didn't ever give anyone an onion, but when I was writing it. I remember drawing on my particular teenage memories of love and romance, because I think those years between 14 and 20 are the up and down years of romantic love.

So, I had personal experience in mind for the poem, from the past, in particular I had a friend who got engaged when we were in the sixth form, so she would have been about 17, and I remember at the time that she felt, and we all felt, that this ring was a good thing for her relationship and it would lead onto further happiness. But in fact within weeks of getting engaged they split up. It was almost as if the ring was like a noose being tightened and it spoilt whatever they and by making it too final. As if the ring was the 'o' of 'no'. So I use that image of engagement and weddings sometimes not being the answer for romantic love.

In 'Salome', why did she kill him?
Well as I said the original narrative of Salome comes from the old testament in the Bible. She did the dance of the seven veils for King Herod and, he was so impressed by her dance that he said she could have any reward she wanted from his palace. Salome's mother went up to the guard and said that she had to have the head of John the Baptist on a platter. And so very quickly this was given to her, his head was chopped off and put on a silver platter and given to Salome for doing her dance. That ís what I was writing about in the poem, but I was trying to change it and explore it from a different angle. The original grizzly decapitation was in the bible.

In the poem 'Mrs Tilcher's Class' what is the significance of the thunderstorm?
That ís a good question.

This is one of these interesting moments in poetry where sometimes in a poem you might put a bit of weather in to make the poem more dramatic or to spice it up or to get a mood. But in this case the day that I left junior school, the very last day of being in Mrs Tilcher's class and of being at a junior school, it is the day that I think of as being the end of childhood. I remember we all ran for the gate because we were free, this was the end of it. There was actually at that moment a thunderstorm and I remember thinking how amazing it was. The sky sort of opened up as though there was a clearing of the decks as though all that was finished. So because it was a true memory and it was so dramatic it fits the mood of the poem. It marked the end of childhood and the changes coming and the thought that perhaps it would not be idyllic. The thunderstorm was an image of both change and newness, but also of complication and perhaps danger.

Why did you make Elvis's twin a girl and not a boy?
Two reasons, firstly because the original twin did die, so I didn't want to write about a real person and a tragic true event. In the poem I am looking at how a woman might do things, so it is to look at the female side of certain stories. This also happens with Anne Hathaway, the famous person being Shakespeare. I'm trying to bring in a different female angle or truth in the poem.

Why did you become a poet?
Firstly I had really brilliant English teachers at all the schools I went to. As well as reading poetry we were encouraged to write it, get involved in using language ourselves and it was always my favourite thing at school. It became a vocation in the way that young people use language in rap now have that vocation around it.