It was a delightful surprise to find out that I had been shortlisted. With something like a small-press pamphlet, especially when you’re not really ‘touring’ to promote it, it’s really difficult to get a sense of any kind of response beyond what is texted to you by friends and family. It floats away from you, and you have no idea where it’s landed. Finding out it had reached people who thought well enough of it to shortlist it was extraordinarily gratifying. As a writer one spends so much time waiting, mostly ‘waiting for the waiting to be over’, that it feels slightly absurd and implausible to check one’s email and see that good things have indeed come.
The pamphlet’s title, Recent Poems, is very much a statement of its miscellaneous nature; it’s a selection of poems rather than a single project. What coherence it has is, I suppose, a result of the consistency of certain preoccupations of mine over the course of my writing life. The moon appears in a lot of these poems, as do buses. The poems were written over a stretch of time, from the start of the COVID pandemic to the present, during which I abandoned a career and became a father. If there’s something that they share, I would call it a kind of distrust of language. Most of the poems come out of the desire to share certain kind of experiences and finding somehow that the words you might use are inadequate. In the earlier sequence, excerpted in the pamphlet, No Monument, I was interested in the way language, and public language especially, was becoming stupider, while at the same time people were hoping for more from it, hoping that naming history or contemporary injustice correctly would help us confront its horrors. The tension between this stupidity and this hope seemed poetically interesting to me, and I was trying to use that same language, laden with guilt and larded with idiocy, to make something musical. In the later poems, I think I wanted to capture something more like an outside to language, especially thinking about my daughter who was at that time not in the world of language at all. I wanted to think about what really struck me (you might notice a lot of different surfaces being struck in the poems). Perhaps if asked to put all this more pithily, I would say it is a set of fairly conventional lyric poems.
The pamphlet owes everything to Rey and Grace. I simply sent them a bunch of recent poems that I hoped worth preserving and they chose the ones they liked best. Initially, it was going to only be poems from the last three years or so, roughly since the birth of my daughter. But then we felt that in a way it worked better to include a bit of earlier work, which maybe situates the pamphlet in a social world that would otherwise be absent or only noticeable in certain idiosyncrasies of diction. The origins of the poems are various, but, gathering them together, I found myself noticing that the poems moved with the seasons, and as they are, like many poems, much preoccupied with the passing of time, we leaned into that, moving from winter to spring through to autumn. I suppose the big question was where to put the big poem, ‘The Sole Unquiet Thing’, written for my daughter. Putting it at the centre, more or less, seemed right, as it kind of announced the end of an old mode and the beginning of a new one. I also knew I wanted to end with a love poem, as I think love poems are underrated these days.
Rey and Grace and I are all members of The Fair Organ collective, a group that responds in various ways to folk music. The Fair Organ has put out several beautiful pamphlets of these responses, and then one day Rey asked me if I wanted to publish a pamphlet of my poems. The editorial process had several stages. The first was Rey and Grace selecting the poems that they wished to publish. In the case of a couple, they asked if I wanted to rewrite them as they felt that they weren’t quite there yet. Occasional references to proper names were queried. After the poems were ‘complete’ in terms of their content, there was also an extremely rigorous line-editing. I tend to use quite a lot of non-standard punctuation. Unfortunately, only about half of it is intentional. I was lucky then to have editors as dedicated as Rey and Grace, who managed to ensure that the poems were grammatically cogent in every place I wanted them to be so. We also had an extended back and forth about where and how it was acceptable to break a line within a word. Rey felt very strongly that it had to follow the boundary of the syllable, whereas I advocated for breaks that were even more arbitrary. Once the poems were complete, we then discussed the ordering, which is roughly chronological and seasonal. Finally, Rey and Grace chose the cover and font, etc. I trusted them and have a certain philistine indifference to typography and book design, which I think they managed to honour while still making the pamphlet actually look great.
The poets who I remember directly quoting or riffing on in the pamphlet are mostly dead. Milton, Shakespeare, Shelley, both Brownings, Elizabeth Bishop, Wallace Stevens, Tennyson, Keats, Ashbery, etc. I acquired the bad habit of thinking of myself as in dialogue with them from a young age. However, I have learned a lot from ‘conversations’ with live poets, too many to name—but I’ll have a go. I think the poems would have been different without the work of among others, Timothy Donnelly, Denise Riley, Terrance Hayes, Oli Hazzard, Luke Roberts, Sandeep Parmar, Verity Spott, Nisha Ramayya, Kevin Davies, Sarah Howe, Jorie Graham, Brenda Shaughnessy, DS Marriot, Ariana Reines, Don Paterson, Paul Muldoon, Anthony Vahni Capildeo. I don’t know if these poets have anything in common. My friend and comrade poet Joseph Minden once claimed I always gravitated to the most Foley-like poem by any poet. Where would I be without Joseph Minden and Will Harris?
I would quote WS Merwin quoting John Berryman:
“I had hardly begun to read
I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can't
you can’t you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don't write.”
