KARAN

Fran, thank you for these powerful, fierce poems. I am such a fan of your density, your fire, your rage, your desire for things to be better, your political conviction. I’m utterly taken by how you weave together cultural critique and personal experience in your poems. Let’s begin with the process question. How do you approach writing a poem? Do you think of these as poems? I feel like your work transcends any and all boundaries of poetry that exist proving that they don’t really exist. Do you have a writing routine? How do you usually begin? Do you start with an image, a line, or an idea, or is it an emotion you wish to express that drives you to the page? And most importantly, why poetry? 

FRAN

Thanks so much Karan, and thanks for having me at ONLY POEMS. There’s so much to unpack there, so I’ll start with the question of form and boundary because that’s something I’ve become increasingly obsessed with over the last five years. Form bothers me. It really bothers me. Infrastructure is entrapment. By which I mean (amongst other things) that received forms — whether architectural, social, political, or aesthetic — reproduce themselves; that they operate on consciousness. There is a profound feedback loop that intimately connects the material and discursive realms; we do not engage with forms so much as we incorporate them. The example I first read about was the panoptic prison, how the prison entails situated patterns of doing that become so deeply embedded in the body and the brain that they ultimately contour the limits and conditions in which conscious thought takes place at all. poetic form is also more than mere decorous dicking about. Just like the panoptic prison, or the elite university, or the vicious binding shapes of legal authority — all these received and obligated forms — poetic form (re)produces and proliferates patterns of thinking, patterns of doing. All of which is to say that when I’m writing across or finding some way to splice/sunder form, I am thinking about creating a disruption in/to those patterns.

But as to how a poem happens, that’s something else again. I feel uneasy talking about “routine” or “process” because those things are so often untenable for working-class people, and the special promise of poetry is (or ought to be) that it is the perfect mode of production for those of us poor in time and in resources. If the text is some kind of a shape-shifting hybrid, then that’s because the social/material conditions that produce the text demand a high level of adaptability and pressured improvisation from the ‘I’ that writes it. On a practical level this looks like writing in the margins — both literally and figuratively — a practice that’s characterised by disruption and incursion, but also, equally, by long empty periods of limbo. The world loves to make poor people wait for shit, so poetry is also what happens into those spaces, is the radical transformation of state-mandated dead time into a place of extra-temporal alchemy. Sometimes the work is very sustained, and sometimes it happens in fragments and flashes. What’s important — to me at least — is that it runs counter to the mingily metered economic temporalities of capitalism.

Of how a poem might begin, there are various ways, but mostly it is with a phrase or an idea that will not quit, and that I need to write out of me in order to exhaust. I don’t like to pathologize my own writing (plenty of  middle-class poetry bros to do that for me) but I do connect this aspect of the writing both to mental illness and to neurodivergence in that the world leaves a somatic residue in the body that I then need to rid myself of or else be overwhelmed by. In this sense, the poem begins quite involuntarily, as a tic or a twitch might. There’s something deeply compulsive about the act of writing itself, the physicality of it. Poetry is language, obviously, but it is also a series of kinetic gestures, and gesture is that which exceeds language, or that which we resort to when language fails or limits us. The doing of the poem is, I think, almost as important to me, as the end result. 

KARAN

Your poems often engage with gender, class, and power dynamics. In “stones,” you explore the physical and metaphorical weight of being looked at and looking away. How do you approach writing about these systemic issues while maintaining the intimacy and urgency of personal experience? Is converging the two a concern for you? Does one (individual) even exist without the other (collective/political)?

FRAN

This is a really good question, and it hits on something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately: within a discursive/cultural space now dominated by right-wing identitarianism something I think we’ve lost sight of is the porous, symbiotic relationship between the individual and the collective, the personal and the political. As in, individual freedom requires social support, to make meaningful choices you need others to respect and/or facilitate those choices; for change to be effected others must — at a minimum — accept that change. “Freedom” is a mutually dependent set of social relationships, so you can’t talk about the individual without evoking the spectre of community/collective. All of which is to say that while I’m often writing about something that is happening/has happened to me —  as a woman, as a queer, as a working-class person of Irish Traveller heritage — I am also trying to place those happenings within their proper social and collective context. Trauma is a profound psychic experience, it is also socially situated. I write about this in relation to shame/humiliation in “on desire”: “we are told we are ashamed. we are not ashamed. shame is a state, humiliation is the traumatic exercise of power, you ass.” I mean that. It serves the aims of power to recast social and structural problems as purely private psychic ones. For instance, I have students who tell me they have “imposter syndrome.” No they don’t. It’s not a symptom or a syndrome to feel unworthy or unwelcome in a world that has been telling you — day in, day out — that you are unworthy and unwelcome. It is merely a rational response based on the social cues you have been given. The worst thing about which is that — not content to make these brilliant, beautiful young people feel like shit — they also want these brilliant, beautiful young people to blame themselves for feeling like shit. And they shouldn’t. Do you hear me, out there? It is not you, it’s them!

To my mind this is what makes a particular brand of Instapoetry so fucking dangerous: you can’t #girlboss your way our of structural inequality, or violent misogyny, or white supremacy, or institutional homophobia, or anything else. “Feeling better” is not a substitute for collective practical action, and you cannot “overcome” structural problems by effort of individual will. It does those who suffer an enormous disservice to pretend that you can. Trauma’s not an event, it’s a structure. If my poetry does not find ways to bang this particular drum, I might as well be Rupi Kaur.

KARAN

I’m intrigued by your use of extended sequences and long poems. Your poems are not just long, they’re thick and dense and demanding. Before anything, I think it’s such a fantastic way to give a finger to the world that is moving at an intense speed toward shorter and shorter forms of communication — what Twitter started and TikTok perfected. In a sense, reelecting a leader who is a joke is the consequence of the reductive meme culture we’re in (yes, I’m referring to Trump, the destroying angel) — the horrible infiltration and unseriousness of the media. Maybe I’m projecting my subjective interpretations of the culture at large on your work, so please correct me in any way you feel I’m wrong. I don’t even have a question really but only an observation. In a world where poetry largely goes either of the two ways — simplistic and substance-lacking Instagram poetry, or obscure and abstract MFA poetry — you’re rejecting these paths brilliantly. Let me sound accusatory for a moment (for the sake of rhetoric): Why does your work demand more — more space, more attention, more vigour — to unfold?

FRAN

This is a little simpler to answer because I think you have already isolated pretty astutely the “why” of what I’m doing. Rachel Blau DuPlessis had a wonderful line in a talk she once gave, about the “malignant rapidity” of late-stage capitalism, which I have been borrowing and trotting out ever since. Again, I am very interested in duration, and what can be done to grind against the obscene temporalities of our neo-liberal attention economy, and the political reality this has engendered — all those patterns of thinking and doing again, which are also ideological. I was reading an essay about Bart Molenkamp, who was a warden at the domed prison of Breda in the Netherlands. Speaking about the prison’s problematic panoptic design, Molenkamp said that it would be better to demolish all prisons every twenty-five years or so. If not, the buildings begin to dictate prison policies and regimes rather than the other way around. I think that’s where we are with the social media apparatus you mentioned, the prison has begun to dictate its own policies and regimes. Of course Musk loves Trump.

This, and I think I am drawn to non-trivial effort/sustained attention as an expression of care. I extend this care to lyric subjects who are so often denied that care as citizen-subjects. Attention is a form of respect. Respect is a form of attention. The respect that poetry owes to the world. I see writing at length as a durational practice that inscribes care, that unfolds a kind of militant noticing. So, I suppose I could say that my interest in duration is two-fold: that it is both a vigilant tenderness, and a wary weather-eye on that which our oppressors would try to divert our attention from. Some days I might want to be Shelley’s nightingale, but more often than not I’m a canary in a coal mine.

KARAN

In addition to the last question: Your poems often engage with popular culture and media while critiquing their influence. In “on desire,” you reference Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and contemporary social media. How do you see poetry’s role in responding to and critiquing modern media culture?

FRAN

Again, this is a really fruitful question. Pop-culture has an enormous presence in my work because I/we are situated within pop-culture, and because this culture entails its own ways of looking at and thinking about the world. I am shaped by those traditions of thought as much as I am shaped by the Romantic lyric tradition, say, or Kantian aesthetics (whatever those are), or by post-colonial theory. For working-class people, our ideological basis is often erratically assembled from such cultural ephemera. Mine certainly was. So, in the first instance, pop-culture — that which “high” culture persistently figures as unmeaning dross — creates its own forms of (often unconscious) knowing that deserve to be taken seriously. In the second, I am engaged in the life’s work of picking apart my own received ideas, trying to pinpoint the place and time they ear-wormed their way into the broader culture. For instance, when I was looking at the origins of anti-Irish racism, my starting point was the depiction of murderous psychopathic “paddies” on British television in the 1970s and 80s and the misery those representations caused us. Where I ended up was 64 BC and the Greek geographer Strabo. He was the first source I could find to describe the Irish as a race of incestuous, cannibal horse-fuckers (I’m paraphrasing). I was interested in that, those continuities and legacies of thought. I pull on the thread, I ask how we/I got here. What have we/I taken in at the eye that has unknowingly shaped the way I/we see (and treat) the world? When we consume culture — when we do culture — whether we like it or not, we are participating in different lineages of thought, whether we’re extending them, complicating them, or perhaps undermining and speaking back to them. I’m interested in those connections, and in what’s at stake in rendering them visible.

I would also say that I am working against the implied assumption current within some elite literary spaces that poetry is a thing apart. I’m not better or somehow separate from the culture that surrounds me. I’m not better than the Sharknado film franchise, or the music of The Fall. Neither am I some kind of dispassionate, oracular witness to these things, passing comment from the outside looking in; my poetry cannot claim to speak with any level of moral authority, but from a position of sensitised enmeshment. I think there is so much pop-culture in my writing because its texts were so often my own intellectual starting points. I am hopelessly entangled. With varying degrees of joyfulness.

KARAN

As the associate editor at Culture Matters, how do you see the relationship between poetry and political activism? I’ve asked this question to you as a practitioner of art since your work often confronts systemic oppression head-on. But as a citizen and consumer of art in England (“not a country, but an industry”) how do you see the intersection of poetic craft and political urgency?

FRAN

It’s a difficult one. Because, here I am banging on about the necessary slow time of poetry, and here we all are encircled by armageddons; by proliferating, escalating urgencies. We all feel it, I think, the pressure — the ethical imperative — to answer each unfolding crisis; to address that which besets us both locally and globally, in swift, direct, and purposeful ways. There are some poets who rise to this challenge (Martin Hayes is a warrior, as is lisa luxx); there are some individual poems that excel at this too. Some of my work attempts a version of it, but in general, I’m after something a little different. 

While I’m always provoked by the material conditions of the present moment, I am also writing into the structural and historical continuities — of violence, neglect, the misuse of power — that brought us here. I am working with the long biography of present disaster. I think (or I like to kid myself anyway) that radical change requires both of these poetic modes. 

I know some poets who don’t have a lot of patience with what they consider to be consciously “crafted” work as being somehow self-involved or indulgent in the face of social and political reality. I would respectfully beg to differ: what is happening in our political reality is happening first within language (and literature), so wrestling with those sets of complex causal relationships is absolutely necessary. Also, with particular emphasis on image making and metaphoricity, we reach and resort to metaphors when we need something unavailable in and to the literal world, don’t we? You can pick your quote of choice here, whether it’s Shelley in his “Defence of Poetry” telling us our work is “vitally metaphorical; that is, it marks the before apprehended relations of things and perpetuates their apprehension” or Audre Lorde writing fiercely that poetry is not a luxury but that it “forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought”. All of which to say that new conjunctions and collisions of unlike things; new metaphors and images are needed to create new thoughts, revitalising language and (potentially) creating hitherto unimagined forms of social relation. Craft goes to the creation of an otherwise, a future we can strategize and eventually inhabit.

I do feel compelled to say, though, that writing a poem isn’t, in and of itself, a form of activism. It is an act of resistance, a means and a method of survival, but it’s not practical, active change. I think a poem can spark or maybe be a storehouse for those energies, but I think art becomes activism only when it goes into the world. Activism is connection. It’s the networks you foster; where and when you speak your words, their reception and transmission. Activism is the space the poem makes for other poems, it’s generosity, it’s listening. That’s partly my ethos at Culture Matters: to make and hold that space, to gather those energies, to build the collective.

KARAN

There’s a school of poetry that believes a poet can categorize their work in one of these four ways: poetry of the body, poetry of the mind, poetry of the heart, poetry of the soul. As in the case of all great poets, I can obviously see all four elements at play in your work, but if you were to, where would you place your work within this framework? And do you see your poetry moving into a different  direction?

FRAN

That’s interesting. I don’t know that it would ever occur to me to divide it up like that because the distinctions between mind and body/emotion and intellect seem fairly arbitrary to me to begin with, and maybe like a bit of an Enlightenment hangover. I’m not a fan of hygienic binaries, and I am acutely aware that a discourse that makes such crisp poetic distinctions has been used to silo black women poets in particular inside the category of “embodiment” as a nasty little short-hand for “lacking-in-intellectual-reach,” which is patently untrue, but has allowed generations of critics to ignore the profound intellectual and aesthetic basis of black women’s poetry as not worthy of probing intellectual engagement or critical attention. I think all poetry — even not-very-good poetry — constellates and strains all of these faculties to a certain degree, because poetry is a kind of heightened awareness, a form of sensitivity and/or receptivity to being alive and in the world.

Slight tangent, but this actually makes me think of the backlash that inevitably follows when a black/brown/queer/trans/poor woman places highly in an industry prize: you suddenly have all these white middle-class dudes wringing their hands about how “identity politics” has “conquered poetry” (these are real quotes from conversations I have actually witnessed). The accusation being, of course, that prizes are now awarded on the basis of subject position and not on the basis of craft. To which, two points, old dudes: 1) prizes have always been awarded — or indeed withheld — for a variety of reasons, some of which have little or nothing to do with the perceived quality of the poetry. If you were unaware of this before, then that is only because this once benefited you. 2) I hate to break it to you, but you have an identity. We all have an identity. Our identities are inscribed in and expressed through our writing in a number of ways both conscious and unconscious, both performative and subterranean. To imagine yourself as identity-neutral is a function of privilege, your identity having been naturalised as the absolute and uncontested model for all human experience. Bully for you!

Rant aside, I suppose what I’m trying to say here is that I’m very wary of dividing poetry (my own or anyone else’s) up, or parcelling it out, or overly determining what it does or doesn’t do. I think what I’m really interested in is in expanding or transgressing existing categories. To take “innovative” poetics, for example, out of its academic enclave; enlarge the definition of “experimental” writing to encompass the types of work typically produced and accessed by working-class people. My own work has tended to reside uncomfortably on the edges of lyric tradition, and I know there are some critics who have been enormously bothered by my relative distance across different projects from some perceived poetic centre. I don’t know how to help those people. My attempt is always to find the appropriate form for the thing I want to say at the moment I want to say it. While I’m generally happy to talk smack about the legacies of reading left to us by the Romantic lyric tradition, there’s an equal amount of perceptual and intellectual baggage unconsciously carried by a generation of poets initiated into a critical discourse that regards stable subjectivity, narrative, and meaning-making as inherently suspect or problematic. Within this intellectual framework difficulty and distortion become not merely poetic tactics but poetic subjects; they form, in fact, an idiomatic universe, one which entails its own array of lyrical conventions/biases/manners. It’s worth remembering that, I think. 

KARAN

You’re a master of dense, rich language and unconventional punctuation. In “they’ll love when you’re…” you create a powerful rhythm through repetition and breaks. How do you approach the visual and sonic aspects of your poems? Does form emerge from content, or vice versa?

FRAN

Honestly, it varies. In the poem you mentioned, I’m using a kind of “forward slash” at the beginning of each end-stopped line. I started working with this particular expressive effect at Cambridge in 2022. I was having a tough time there, and trying to write my way out of it by incorporating all my random episodes of stress-induced thought-blocking in poetically useful ways; using my fraught situational response to Cambridge to reinvent poetic method. So, one way to read the slash is as an interruption or jump-cut, a pivot in the midst of narrative cohesion. But I’m also after something a bit like the medieval virgule, which, in medieval manuscripts, was often the only form of punctuation, so expected to do a lot of heavy lifting: it could signify a pause, or a connection between words and phrases. It was not used to indicate mutually exclusive alternatives as it often is now. For me, it’s about signalling contingency, ambiguity, saying “either or,” implying connections between seemingly disparate things. 

Virgule means twig, which made me think of Ogham, where the individual strokes were referred to in Irish as flesca or sticks. The forward slash looks like Ogham, specifically, like Muin, which might stand alternately for affection or treachery, so again ambiguity, uncertainty, discomfort. The ghost of one mark-making tradition haunting the typography of another. That’s obviously a really specific example, but in general what I’m doing is trying to triangulate form, content, and undercurrent — what’s going on in my head when I’m writing the poem, irrespective of what that poem is actually about. 

In terms of sound, I’m usually aiming at propulsive thrust, motive force, because I think and speak quickly, there’s an urgency, a pressure. And we keep being told, don’t we, that good ol’ iambic pentameter is modelled on “natural” speech rhythms. Well, who and what is “natural” in this context? Measured forms of speech — the very concept of poetic “flow” — necessarily proceed from a safe contemplative position not equally possible for everyone. And Traveller speech rhythms are not iambic pentameter. Working-class speech rhythms are not iambic pentameter. I want poetry that sounds like it's for me, for us.

KARAN

I notice recurring themes of class consciousness and resistance in your work. In “match my freak” desire and resistance gorgeously intertwine. How does your background inform your poetic voice? Do you find that poetry provides a unique space for exploring class identity and struggle? I’m going to be silly and undermine the gravity of the question I just asked by adding this one: if you could be any other kind of artist, which would it be?

FRAN

Well, when you’re right, you’re right. Class consciousness is a big deal for me. It’s all over the work and it’s not subtle. Ha! But in all seriousness: the thing about language is that it is prior to us; it’s a pre-existing system we are born into, and by the time we get here, it has already been determined and contorted into delimiting shapes that in turn define and delimit us. Language isn’t “free”, and neither are we. In Northern Europe, the oldest surviving written documents are legal in nature, they’re concerned with penalties, prohibitions, and punishments; they’re concerned with hierarchy. I think about this a lot. Class — or, more accurately, power — is enacted through language. More than this, the necessity that gives birth to written language is the establishment and maintenance of hierarchy. It’s not a neutral tool. 

And English, for myself, has always been the language of denial, control, administration. I say that working-class and Traveller people are on the “receiving end” of English, that we’re at its mercy. Yet English is also the only language that I have, so the challenge and the need for me is to find a way of using English that undoes some of its instrumental eloquence, some of its mean coercive power. Poetry allows for this, I think, the unmaking of the pain of English with English; the forcing of that unhomely home to make room for me. Poetry squats the sanctioned structures of English, repurposes it towards its own ends. Poetry at its best is, I think, a kind of trespass or infiltration, and this is possible, in part, because poetry is such a marginal cultural form, underfunded and largely unloved with respect to wider literary culture. It isn’t amenable to the same kinds of marketised assimilation. It’s spiky, it’s difficult. That’s the source of its power.

So, I don’t know that I would choose differently if I had the choice. I love music, but I’ve also seen how a kind of plausible musicality can and has been used to bypass our critical faculties and sneak toxic shit past us on the sly. I love art and cinema, but where we are now — this especially unlovely political and social moment — is, in part, the product of a visual cultural bias. I want a cultural form that is indigestible (or as indigestible as possible) to regimes of power. I want friction. I want something uneasy to assimilate. I choose poetry. Every time I choose poetry. 

KARAN

You’ve published seven poetry collections and are critically so well-acclaimed (you’re one of my all time favourites!) and you’re an editor and have also taught. What is something you’d like to say to young writers, as advice or caveats?

FRAN

I think it might be closer to thirteen collections now (which makes me feel both old, and a little silly), but thank you. I never know what it means to be “critically acclaimed,” though. Some people have said they like what I do. Some of them have said it in print, which is gratifying, and I’m grateful. But day-to-day, trying to live, to find and keep a job, to be a person in the world, the overwhelming feeling I have is one of (mainly) unexceptional drudgery. Poetry is like living with chronic pain, like my endometriosis, in that it’s something that can neither be cured nor quit. I don’t succeed, and I don’t fail, I merely endure. That’s supposed to be funny. But also, I mean it.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot, how poetry is something I’m sworn to stick out, but also the method/means by which I stick it out. All of this to say that I’m not in much of a position to offer advice. Except that poetry isn’t here to save you, or to make you feel better, and if you go in hoping for that you’re going to be disappointed. What it can do, its real promise, is offer you a way of being in the world. Not “making sense” of life, but exposing and holding to the light life’s lack of sense; to reach and meet others in your confusion and your fury, to ease their alone-ness, if only for a moment. If that’s not enough, then take up crochet, write a novel, save yourself.

In terms of just being “out there” and doing it, the only other thing I can offer that might be generically useful is: do not become complicit in your own defeat by not trying. Not trying is failure by default. Don’t give the bastards who told you “no”, that this isn’t for you, that you can’t, that you shouldn’t, the satisfaction. Do not be afraid to look stupid: assume the risks of failure. Work grows and becomes exciting and alive in all those moments of humiliated over-reach. Don’t strive to be competent, strive to be interesting, strive to be yourself, because you have to: every other fucker is taken. 

KARAN

Recently, we decided to ask our poets for a poetry prompt at the end. Would you provide a prompt for our readers, to help kickstart a poem?

FRAN

Sure. This is actually from a workshop series I’m currently teaching, and it brings me neatly back around to our early sexy metaphor chat, thinking about the way we reach for metaphor to create  wonderful impossible places/voices/bodies unavailable to us in the literal world as it is. There’s a sonnet by the Scottish poet Harry Josephine Giles composed entirely of self-contained single line metaphors, describing by creating, such an impossible voice:

https://booksfromscotland.com/2024/06/them-by-harry-josephine-giles/

My challenge for you is to create a poem using only self-contained metaphors, and use it to bring into being the impossible place, voice, body, idea or object you yearn to establish in the real.

KARAN

We’d love for you to recommend a piece of art (anything other than a poem) — perhaps a song, a film, or a visual artwork — that you find particularly inspiring or that you think everyone should experience.

FRAN

This is simultaneously a fantastic question, and a really hard one. Firstly, choosing what to recommend in the first place, and the concomitant anxiety about getting that “wrong”, but also tough because I think such recommendations open up questions about access and opportunity. I might, for instance, recommend the drawing of two sirens — bird and fish — that form part of The Peterborough Psalter (a 13th century illuminated manuscript), but given that these are only accessible at the Parker Library at Pembroke College, Cambridge University, what point or purpose would that serve? Apart from a grubby little status claim on my part? Check out my massive thumping privilege everybody!!! So, I’m going to recommend something we can all (“all” being those of us reading this, so with an implied level of internet access) enjoy, and that is the “Song of Faithful Departed” by The Radiators, written by the late Phil Chevron.

For lyric gift alone, Phil Chevron should occupy a position every bit as internationally exalted as Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen. Yet he doesn’t. Too Irish. Too gay. And The Radiators never achieved the success they deserved. They were pioneers, the first Irish punk band, and without them none of the other music I love would have been possible. Phil Chevron joined the Pogues around 1984 and wrote for them the brilliant — and arguably his most well-known — song “Thousands Are Sailing.” While I love that record, “Song of the Faithful Departed”, written some three years earlier, is an enduring obsession. It captures that impossible and frustrated love so many of us feel for Ireland; it carries that quality of bruised and struggling tenderness, that need to love despite ourselves. It’s a song about all our difficult homelands, and it’s a song about working-class grief, of groping to find a framework and an exit for that grief, something more satisfying, more real, than the religious and nationalistic scripts we’ve been offered. This search is especially sharp for queer persons, or those otherwise excluded from easy identification with their “homeland.” To love a home that will not love you back is a rare, strange pain. There’s something in the synthy swagger of the music that speaks to this uneasiness. It feels savvy and alive, but also a little awkward and at odds. It’s punk learning how to speak through Irishness, Irishness sussing out how to express itself through punk. This is the song I played to digital glitches following the death of my best friend, conscious that I was grieving for us as much as for him, for an entire generation out of sync with and brutalised by somewhere we ought to have thought of as “home.” This is one of the most enduring themes in my own work, but I don’t think I’ve ever come as close to distilling those feelings as Chevron in this song. 

KARAN

Finally, Fran, because we believe in studying the master’s masters, we would love to know which poets who have influenced you the most so far.

FRAN

In terms of my loadstone poets, who have been with me for years and never cease to inspire me, allow me to recommend the following top five. Some you’ll probably know, others I’ll give a brief introduction to: 1) Padraic Fiacc, the North of Ireland’s largely neglected iconoclast poet of sectarian rage. His work is uncompromising, confrontational and spare. He never had the success of Famous Seamus, Muldoon, or Mahon, but he was/is my favourite, because he’s a poet with rare clarity and fearlessness. 2) Emily Dickinson, and the older I get, the less mysterious and more admirably self-determined her aesthetic choices and manner of living seem to me. 3) Sean Bonney, although a British poet/intellectual, Bonney lived for many years in Berlin, and his was really a European — even global — lyric sensibility. We lost him in 2019 and he is sorely missed. His writing evolved a fierce historical critique of capitalism that was matched on the streets by his political commitment. He managed also to be tender and brooding and funny as fuck — everything the best of lyric can be. While it has never been my ambition to write “like” Bonney as such, his committed and passionate engagement with language, with its uses, abuses and liberatory potentials has served as a  model for my own practice. 4) Hannah Weiner, especially her Clairvoyant Journal, because she was the first artist I came across to use her “mental illness” to reinvent poetic method; because she made me gasp at the realisation that this too is poetry, that it has this visual and spatial dimension. 5) Roddy Lumsden, the great Scottish poet — as well as being an editor of some stature — who was also my editor, mentor and friend. For the tightly turned conceit, the flourish of formal daring, the whiplash of a line well turned, Maestro, you are missed. 

On my desk at the moment, I also have: C.S. Giscombe, Hanif Abdurraquib, Harry Josephine Giles, R.S. Thomas, Lucie Brock-Broido, Miyó  Vestrini, and — as of yesterday — Nuar Alsadir, Vona Groake and Shane McCrae. I love to read across traditions in contemporary poetry, to find the points of commonality and divergence between living poets writing now.