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The Poetry Kit Interviews Peter Howard
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Tell me about your background. Where were you born and brought up? I was born in
Nottingham and lived first of all in the Do you come from a literary family? Both my
grandfathers were coal miners. My mother's parents were very religious and I
suspect that influenced her to train as a teacher. My father was a postman
and a butcher's boy before World War II, and then joined the RAF Regiment.
(The RAF Regiment operated searchlights and AA artillery at airfields. The
Army had previously done those jobs, but there were conflicts of interest and
loyalty.) When he was demobbed at the end of the war, he joined the teacher
training scheme, specialising in Science (he'd always been interested) and
English (he knew how to read). In fact, he read voraciously. It's probably
not surprising, given their backgrounds, that my parents pushed me quite
hard. But the answer to your question, is probably
"Not in the sense that most people would understand it." When did you start writing poetry? I was
interested in poetry from quite an early age. I remember a book of poems I
had when I was about six. In What were the books\events that most influenced your beginning as a
writer? I suppose it's
fairly boringly conventional: I was very taken with Eliot, especially The
Wasteland. I admired Donne, particularly the sexy and the scientific poems.
Blake seems to have been a strong influence, judging by the symbolism I used
in the first things I wrote. As to events, my first poems were influenced by
the fact that my best friend had got off with a girl I fancied, and I was
insanely jealous. What sort of poetry did you begin writing - what were its main themes
and techniques? My first poems
were formal: the first poem I wrote was a crack at a Petrarchean
sonnet. I wrote quite a lot in sonnet forms; much of the rest of my early
stuff was metrical and rhymed. I branched out into short, free-ish form things, and I've subsequently written both formal
and informal stuff. Informal poetry is much harder. I've never believed in
free verse - there's always a price to pay. The first things I wrote were
about unrequited love (never about requited love for some reason,
though I did have some of that) and social alienation. There were a couple of
deaths I wrote about. Then I think it got a bit more interesting and
adventurous: there was a colourful, surreal transformation of the Whitgift shopping centre in Croydon,
and a philippic about a publisher of computer books who'd commissioned a
series to which I contributed, and then weaselled out of the arrangement. To what extent do your 'roots' influence what you are writing now? Not much,
fundamentally, but quite a lot in detail. Because I've lived in various areas
of the country, I don't have a strong sense of 'place' or the need to write
about one location in any detail. Nor am I rooted deeply in any 'class' sense
- my grandparents' working class background is too remote to have any
profound influence; by the time I went to Oxford, the class associations of
that place were much weaker than they had been, or were popularly imagined to
be. How does the way you make a living influence your poetry? I make my
living as a engineer designing radio systems for
organisations who need more than a mobile phone: railways, ambulance
services, gas boards, airports and so on. These days, it involves a lot of
computer software. A lot of my poetry is influenced by that, either by the
technical aspects of my job, or by the general business environment in which
I work. They (especially the former) are perhaps areas which don't get a
great deal of attention from poetry, so I feel it's a niche where I can maybe
make a contribution. I wasn't trained as an engineer, though. I read Physics
and Philosophy at Can you describe your most effective working method? Do you wait for
inspiration, or sit down every day with the intention of writing? I try
to write every day, but don't always succeed. Often I'll spend my lunch hour
at work writing, and then e-mail the results to myself at home to continue
with. I tend to have spells where I can start things, but not finish them,
and other times when I finish things off. I also have spells where I can do
neither. My best poems (however you judge what 'best' means) tend to come out
of nowhere, so I suppose you could call that inspiration. But I do think it's
an over-rated term, used mostly as an excuse for not writing anything. How important to you are formal workshops, or getting the opinions of
other poets about your work-in-progress? I've gained a
lot from workshops, whether they've been face-to-face, postal, or conducted
in cyberspace. They can have their dangers though: once you get to know the
group, you can be tempted to write what you know will please them, rather
than what you ought to be writing. The most valuable workshops I've attended
have been those on courses I've been on, at the Taliesin Trust. There,
you're immersed for a week with a bunch of people who think it's quite normal
to be interested in writing poetry, which is a very refreshing experience. I
also go to a few one day tutored courses. Although by now I've done the exercises
enough times to know them off by heart, it's still useful in giving a
structured time to write. Writing circles where you read and comment on each
others' poems are useful if you find the right one. You have to be careful
how you take the comments you receive. Really, you should only change your
poem in response to what someone says if your reaction is "Why didn't I
think of that?" Otherwise you're letting someone else write your poem
for you. And for me, at any rate, it's important that comments tell me what
doesn't work (or does) and (maybe) why it doesn't, but certainly not how to
change it. If someone suggests a rewording, then I'm reluctant to use it,
because it doesn't belong to me. That's quite a difficult requirement,
because sometimes it's easier to say how you think something should be
worded, than to articulate what's unsatisfactory about the current wording. To what extent if any do you collaborate with other artists? My first
attempt at a hypertext poem was Midwinter Fair, and I
invited other poets to contribute, by linking their own poems or fragments.
Quite a few did, and I like the result. (It's still open, by the way, if
anyone else wants to join in.) I'd like to
do a hypertext with a more close collaboration with other artists, but that
hasn't happened, yet. I did once make a minimal contribution to a renga that was eventually published. My wife, Heather, is
a painter (out of work hours - she is also a telecoms engineer by day), and
I've written poems about her work. I keep trying to persuade her to paint in
response to my poems, but no luck so far. How do you decide that a poem is finished? It's easiest
with sonnets: if it's got fourteen iambic pentametrical
lines, it rhymes in the right places, and makes some sort of sense, it's
finished! Seriously though, if you've managed to do all that then it probably
is fairly near completion. Really, the only way is to try as hard as you can
to detect part of you telling yourself "I can get away with this."
Once you've heard that little voice, you know it's not finished.
Marion Lomax taught me this on a course. Every time
I showed her a new draft of a poem I was working on, she'd say "This is
an improvement, but you can't do that." I'd look to where her
finger was pointing and realise that I'd known I couldn't do that, but
thought no one would notice, that it was good enough. They did, and it
wasn't. It's more difficult than it seems to admit to yourself
that something won't quite do, but it's a habit worth cultivating. Who do you write for? - Do you have a particular audience or person in
mind? My principal
audience is myself. I don't know if that sounds egotistical: it's not meant
to be. I think it's inevitable. If the poem doesn't work for me then I can't
in conscience try to fob it off on anyone else. Having said that, I do
sometimes write with a person in mind. Most often it's Heather - when I'm
writing love poetry for instance. Sometimes it's for someone else, if they've
asked me to write something, or suggested a topic. Most often, though, I
write the poem first, and then wonder who might be interested in it. Does poetry have to be 'simple' to get an audience? Not at all.
Some people prefer simple poems; others like the challenge, and perhaps the
deeper perceptions of complicated poems. (Notice I said 'perhaps' - I'm not
falling into the trap of claiming that complicated poems are necessarily
deep.) But if you're talking about an audience in the strict sense of the
word, i.e. at a reading, then I think you probably need the poetry to have a
simple, accessible level. It can be more complicated underneath. Even here,
it's assuming the audience hasn't heard the poem before. If you're an
Immensely Famous poet, and most of your audience is familiar with your work,
then doubtless you can read more complicated stuff and be appreciated. In my
case, this is a purely academic point. Which of contemporary poets do you most admire? Oh, this is a
difficult question. I notice you said 'admire' rather than 'like' or 'enjoy.'
Those are all very different things, though there's a lot of overlap. Can I
mention Miroslav Holub,
even though he's sadly no longer with us? I admire him for his bravery; I
like him for his celebratory use of scientific imagery; and I enjoy him for
his wonderful sense of humour. I admire John Whitworth for his tremendous
honesty and consummate skill. I like and enjoy his poetry too. I admire Ted
Hughes but I don't like him (I mean his poetry) all that much. Same goes for
Seamus Heaney, I'm ashamed to say. (I should make clear that I like and enjoy
some of the work of both those admirable poets, but only some.) I like
Matthew Sweeney's work a lot and enjoy it too, but where it comes in the
admiration stakes, I'm less sure. Same goes for Jo Shapcott,
almost inevitably. Les Murray is another I admire, for the sprawl, like for
the sweep, and enjoy for the exhilaration. Reading him is like being deluged
by a breaking wave of language and ideas. I could go on all night, but I'd
better stop. If I answered this question tomorrow, you'd probably get an
entirely different set of names. Which trends in modern poetry do you find most interesting? I'm not very
good with trends. I'm not sure I'd recognise one if I met it in the street. I
suppose I'm interested in magic realism, if that's a trend and if I've
understood the term correctly. Where a poem describes impossible things, but
in a way that makes you believe them, and in doing so illuminates some real
aspect of the world. Some of Carol Ann Duffy's poetry does that (I should
have added her to my list of admirable poets) and much of Sweeney and Shapcott. Quite a different sort of trend is to use the
characteristics of formal poetry, rhyme and metre and so forth, but in a more
imaginative and less restrictive way. I think that's quite interesting, and
probably a Good Thing. Does poetry have any influence outside poetry? Poets tend to
be a bit gloomy about this question, and worry that it doesn't. It's true
that a lot of poetry is read largely by those who write it, and there are
precarious livings being earned by poets taking in one another's washing. On
the other hand, poetry plays an important part in the development of language
skills in children; the techniques of poetry, at least, are widely used in
advertising; some poets have used their talents influentially in the their advocation of political objectives (Ginsberg in the U.S.,
Adrian Mitchell in the U.K. to cite two obvious cases); and the reading or
writing of poetry has comforted innumerable people in times of stress or
crisis. Holub said that someone had once written to
him to thank him for his poetry. The guy was on the brink of suicide, but
after reading one of Holub's poems, had decided not
to kill himself, after all. That's an important influence. Do you see 'performance poetry' and 'slam' as sideshows or a return to
the origins of poetry as story-teller and social conscience? It's probably
heretical to say so, but I don't think the origins of poetry are all that
important to how poetry is done today. It's like arguing about the origins of
a word or an institution: it can be interesting thing to do, but it doesn't
necessarily tell you anything about the current function. And it certainly
doesn't give any weight to how one ought to use a word or pursue an art to
argue that that's how people used to do it. Performance poetry does different
things from other sorts of poetry. (There's an implicit binary distinction
here that I'm unhappy with: there is a continuum between poetry that only
makes sense in performance, and poetry that only makes sense on the page.) Or
rather, it does similar things, but in a different way. Like any other style
of poetry, there are both good and bad examples. Can poetry and science live together? Many of the
concepts of science are rather difficult, and this difficulty is sometimes
masked by the attractive and apparently familiar terminology, especially that
of mathematics and physics. It can be tempting to make purely linguistic use
of terms like charm, force, chaos, energy, incompleteness, and forget (or not
realise in the first place) that the technical senses of these word have only
a tenuous connection with their everyday uses. Then it looks as if one has
constructed a metaphor from science, when one has actually only constructed a
metaphor from the language of science, which is a much less interesting thing
to have done. What use do you make of the internet? I have my own web site, on which I
display some of my poems, maintain a list of links to other poetry sites, and
publish various hypertext poems. I subscribe to a couple of email poetry lists, which brings
me into contact with other poets, with other outlooks, which is stimulating.
I used to be very active in CompuServe's Poetry Forum, but I've not done much
there for a while, because I found it was taking too much of my time. I've
had some poems published on e-zines, though I'm
afraid I'm reactionary enough to prefer seeing my stuff in honest print.
That's totally illogical of me, as far as I can see. Is internet publishing just a cheaper way of getting your poems seen
by a wider audience, or is it liable to produce new kinds of poetry? The concept of
hypertext poetry is an extremely exciting one, and the Internet is an ideal
medium in which to create and display it. Well, almost ideal: the way in
which HTML has been developed, and the rivalry between browser developers has
given rise to some very frustrating incompatibilities. But the ability to
provide different routes through a piece, to make dynamic use of images,
sounds, and layout, strikes me as providing the potential for new kinds of
poetry. It also provides the potential for new kinds of silliness, but that's
a risk with any technology. What are you working on at the moment? The
requirements that the implementation of Mobile Station Energy Economy mode functionality
place on the interface between Layer 3 and the Medium Access Control layer of
the TETRA protocol stack in a digital radiocommunications
infrastructure. Oh, you meant poetry-wise. I've been writing some poems using
fairly simple scientific and mathematical metaphors, and trying to see if
they might form any sort of coherent sequence, or are best kept separately.
I'm investigating gently the possibility of producing a light anthology of
poems about food; this is in collaboration with Diane Engle, a © Peter Howard, Ted Slade 1998 From http://www.poetrykit.org/iv98/howard.htm Academic year 2008/2009 |