Is there a point at which you decide to develop the craft of poetry?
I suppose, for me, I think of craft as second to voice. I am always trying to keep my voice as fresh, as personal, as distinct to me, as possible. Looking at things from that perspective, voice drives the craft. I am fascinated by how language works, especially because of how it works in Northern Ireland. Even me saying Northern Ireland just now is a controversial use of language, and so I am interested in how that operates in poetry.
My drive is always to find a way to develop my voice: I look to Ciaran Carson or Paul Muldoon, poets whose voices contain niches and surprises for me every time I read their work. I want to find a way to keep making language fun, to keep making it do strange things, contort itself until it breaks.
What about form? Does form matter?
I like the poem to sort of tell me what form it should take. I know that is a very poet answer.
I do have a soft spot for the sonnet. You can do a lot with the sonnet. One of the first serious poetry projects I worked on just after leaving school, I worked on a series of sonnets commissioned by the Northern Ireland Office for the centenary of Northern Ireland; it was a crown of sonnets, and I learned a lot about my relationship with form as I was writing that.
I am also interested in fragmentation as a structural device, and what you can do with white space. I think there’s something subliminal always happening when you use, or don’t use, space in particular ways – it’s what you’re not saying then that carries the space, that becomes the poem. You are playing with the sense that words should take up certain spaces and when the words aren’t there that has quite a jarring effect, a violent effect, on readers. I quite like that.
I went through a phase where every poem I’d write would be in rhyming couplets. I exhausted the rhyming couplet. I wouldn’t go back there.
What about themes?
Working on the pamphlet was interesting. I can remember the day I sat down and decided I would put together a pamphlet; I had a group of poems which had been sitting with me for years – the oldest poem in the pamphlet is 5 years old, I wrote it when I was 17, and it happens to be the poem that opens the pamphlet.
In terms of themes, the Greater Shankill appears quite a bit. I love the way Scott McKendry writes about “The Hammer” and Micky Magee writes about The Falls, and the way Ciaran Carson writes about Belfast. Carson in particular, who said, and I can only paraphrase because he said it best, that you can’t escape these places when you write, the places you’re from, your internal map, you have to translate them onto the page as honestly and vibrantly as possible and that is what I want to do.
I do write a lot of love poems, and I write about being queer in Belfast. That is an ongoing struggle for me, and it raises questions about the tensions between being working class and being queer in Belfast. Both those aspects of my life have asked similar things of me: how do I present myself; how do I write; how do I express myself; all in order to be perceived in a way that keeps me both safe and in concurrence with my sense of self.
Where to Now?
My pamphlet is coming out in February –– I am really looking forward to that! –– and after that I will be looking at doing a PhD at Queen’s. People will be able to get the pamphlet at the website of fourteen poems, linked below.
