Long Poem Magazine

I started writing in my mid-20s, having read little contemporary poetry. I was living in Liverpool, a place with a lot of accessible poetry going on, and soon I was drafting poems and reading very widely – from Norman McCaig to Peter Redgrove, from Ian Hamilton Finlay and Edwin Morgan to Geoffrey Hill. Later I was a regular team member at Adrian Henri’s monthly readings which featured a variety of guests, including Christopher Logue and W.S. Graham, and was involved in other events where I met McCaig and Morgan. These early foundations led me to value the way a poem sounded – how it read aloud – as well as an interest in a degree of experimentation with form and content, and a readiness to use humour as a way of going deeper. And the poem as a process of working things out – why did I notice that, why did it spark something in me? Two other characteristics emerged too – a lot of poems speaking in voices that were not my own, and a growing tendency to write, not individual poems, but sequences; I think of this as a ‘faceted’ approach, poems about different angles of a topic clustered together and shedding light on each other.

Looking specifically at the work I’ve had published in Long Poem Magazine, I can see all these characteristics at play. The magazine’s earliest selection was from a sequence called ‘My Life As A Mad King’, later published as a pamphlet by Oystercatcher and incorporated into the Shearsman collection My My My Life. The mad king writes villanelles – he almost always manages 19 lines and gets the repetitions in the right places, but often mutated – and he can’t cope with rhyme, which made it easier for me. I researched this by reading about medieval and Renaissance courts, particularly the Medici’s, and also about Charles VI of France, whose delusion was that he was made of glass – my reading often sparks ideas, and I’ll do more research to amplify. Did I mention that I used to be a librarian?

Next in Long Poem Magazine was ‘My Life in The Gloaming’, a sequence of 18 prose fragments which explored these moments when you wake at twilight from a nap and don’t know who you are for a moment or two. The result was a variety of provisional answers to the question of identity, and a number of different voices from twilight moments in many times and places. The sequence was also incorporated in the My My My Life volume.

Most recently in LPM was an abecedary called ‘Urals’; the Russian novels of the nineteenth century had captivated me in my teens and I was later to visit Russia a couple of dozen times over a dozen years. The idea of ‘Urals’ was to present an alphabetic listing of heterogeneous lines surviving from lost (or unwritten) Russian novels; every line was meant to have a separate impact, tending towards being (Yannis Ritsos’ word) monochords but also showing the influence of haiku and senryu (which I write regularly) and some of Glen Baxter’s captions. These lines came very quickly, with little additional reading, then got a fine-tuning to create some internal echoes. Again, humour plays a part. The sequence is also incorporated in my latest Shearsman collection Words Of Mercury.

My thanks to LPM’s editors over this period, Linda Black, Lucy Hamilton and Claire Crowther, for their encouragement and indulgence. It’s a great magazine, a rare sanctuary and showcase for longer work, in which I’ve been able to read some wonderful, inspiring writing over the years.