From the Archives - 'Walking on Water' interview

My colleague, Daniel Parsons, has been looking through his old blogs with a view to possibly making a return to the medium. He reminded me of the interview he kindly invited me to do with him in 2007, mostly on the subject of my booklet, Walking on Water. We are both still quite pleased with it and so I've adjusted it slightly and exhume it here for the sake of posterity.

How would you describe your collection ‘Walking on Water’ in one sentence?

It’s relaxed and confident.

Why did you choose the poem ‘Walking on Water’ as the title for your latest collection?

It’s the best title for a collection of all the poems in it. But it also probably refers to the confidence and perhaps, at a push, refers to the thing that poetry at its best can do with language. Like doing the seemingly impossible, although you can see how it’s done if you look closer.

If you could recommend somebody to read just one poem in ‘Walking on Water’ which one would it be and why?

It’s such a short book that it wouldn’t take very long to read it all. But I wonder if ‘Piccadilly Dusk’ is somehow the best thing in it. I hope it translates the moment into something the reader can share and I think it is a well-made thing. I was lucky to have the word ‘expatriate’ waiting in the back of my mind, ready for use, and it fitted in nicely here.

Notions of nature, weather and the seasons are well represented in ‘Walking on Water’ do you have any particular environmental and ecological views?

I remember someone who read ‘Museum’ in 1991 remarking that there was a lot of weather in it. I don’t do it consciously- perhaps it’s an English obsession. Perhaps being a bike rider, I’m always looking at the weather with a view to my next ride. Or perhaps the weather and the seasons are moods, easy and useful ‘objective correlatives’, in Eliot’s famous phrase.
I think the planet- and our lives on it- has probably been damaged beyond repair already but it’s not meant to be a theme in my poems.

When did you become interested in, and start writing, poetry?

Creative writing was always an easy option at school from the earliest age. I can’t really remember not being interested in words but it wouldn’t have been until I was 14 or 15 that I deliberately set out to write poems. It’s hard to say when, or if ever, I wrote my first successful poem. I began ‘Re-read’, the selected poems, with Ferdinand, which I wrote when I was about 18 but the poems I had in the school magazine for a few years before that were okay for a teenager. I still haven’t written my essay on how ‘ poet is the easiest job in the world’.

Who would you cite as your most significant influences in poetry?

Thom Gunn was the poet who made me want to be a poet in the same way that George Best made me want to be a footballer. After that, the example of Philip Larkin. And after him, many of them. Once I could have pointed out lines here and there where my poems echoed Hardy, Auden or several others but I’ve gradually forgotten where the bodies are buried. ‘Sometime Gone’ in Walking on Water is deliberately homage to James Fenton’s poem ‘Out of Danger’. But I don’t think about other poets in those terms so much now, or try not to.

I understand some readers in the past have been slightly critical of your cerebral approach and technique, contending that you don’t write enough for the ‘common man’ (whatever one of them may be). How do you respond to this accusation?

I remember that Martin Stannard wrote in PQR that my Tycho Brahe poems read like ‘biography by numbers’ and that he suggested I wrote too many poems about other works of art. Giles Darvill wrote a review of ‘Re-read’ in South magazine that said the effect was of ‘human feeling and energy packed into the discipline of a silicon chip’. The Darvill was a much more positive review than the Stannard but I don’t see either accusing me of being overly cerebral. If one wants ‘cerebral’ poetry one goes to Prynne, Basil Bunting, Ezra Pound and those who attend the conferences at Cambridge. I’m with Larkin, Edward Thomas and those who would like to be accessible at a first reading, although I’d like to think that one reading is not all that it would take to enjoy a poem properly.

What advice, if any, would you give to any poets, aspiring or otherwise?

You have to enjoy it for its own sake. It certainly doesn’t do any harm to read lots of different poets. But there’s no money in it and it’s a cliquey, small industry so it’s best not to make any plans for a career in it. I’m glad to be outside of most of that.
Enjoy the words and the ways one can use them. If your poems make you genuinely happy with what you’ve done then that's a great feeling and as much as one can ask.