Interview

Here's a transcript of an interview I did for Poetry North West Magazine in 2009. It covers most of the basics I think. The man asking the questions was Simon Jenner.

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How did you start writing poetry?
I’ve always dabbled. I think I wrote my first poem when I was six. It was about our cat at the time and I can still recite it to this day. I seem to remember writing another one at the same time about drugs. It wasn’t that I had a clue what drugs were, it was just that I heard the word on the TV news and got the impression from the reporter that drugs were not good things. I read that poem out proudly to my mother who was extremely unimpressed. That’s probably about as controversial as I’ve ever got with my poetry!

From then on I kept notebooks, diaries and often jotted down quotes, random thoughts or ideas. At school I was always writing short books and stories and lending them to friends to read. Most of them were little more than juvenile Viz-style observations really, but they seemed quite popular and that spurred me on to keep writing.

It wasn’t until my early 20s that all of this dabbling started to come together in to some sort of order. That was when I started doing readings of my work and making a full-time job of it. What I’d do is write serious poems that would just sit in my folder unknown and comedy poems that I would do live. I guess you could say that I was pretty much a comedy poet, although that’s an awful phrase. I did the live work for a number of years. Eventually, around 1997, I got a bit bored with the scene. I probably let the negative aspects of the performance community get to me a little too much. I also remember a very political comedian taking me to task for only writing about what he considered to be trivial subjects. He thought I should be challenging people, talking about issues. Today I’d just ignore him, but at the time I really took it to heart, looked inwardly at my work and felt it lacked merit. I don’t think anything I did live after that was ever the same; the spark just seemed to have gone and a feeling of worthlessness set in. In fact, I didn’t do a great deal after that. What a sensitive fool I was!

From there, I just went back to writing and ditched the live work. This was quite a ridiculous thing to do really as the live work was what kept the money coming in. That decision meant that I had to get a succession of ‘real’ jobs. Needless to say, I didn’t really enjoy those and got quite down about it all. They were my Churchillian ‘wilderness years’ I like to think. In 2005 I decided to take the hit and just go back to writing. So I bought a motorhome went off to Cornwall, lived with virtually no money and wrote. It was in Cornwall that I finished my novel and compiled my first proper book of poetry. Fortunately, a fabulous little Cornish–based publisher, Palores Publications, liked the poetry I was writing and agreed to publish it. I was doubly fortunate that another small publisher liked my novel and agreed to publish that too. From there, I was pretty much back on the road I follow now.