Do you have any early memories of being interested in writing?
I suppose I found it very late. I mean, it wasn’t a traditional route into writing and poetry. It certainly wasn’t through school. I suppose my introduction to poetry was through lyrics and music.
My earliest love, and my enduring love, is for the Beatles and their lyrics, especially the lyrics of John Lennon. And from there Oasis as well, a band that would very much encapsulate my teenage years. To me there’s a beauty and a melancholy within their lyrics which I find very appealing.
Lyrics were your starting point?
I think so, lyrics were the starting point. After that I kept journals, or not journals as such, but books with lyrics and rhymes in them throughout my teenage years, which are quite embarrassing to look back on. I still have them. But I was writing all the time when I think about it, writing continually in my spare time.
What about support or encouragement at home?
Not at all. We certainly weren’t a family of readers. I don’t remember there being many books in the house when I was growing up other than what I brought home from school. As I said, I was listening to Beatles records or CDs, I was listening to Oasis.
You could add the bass or dance culture element into that which came from listening to Pirate Radio. Now that had a huge influence on my attempts to put words together. We would have all sat around in a friend’s bedroom, passed the microphone around, listened to drum and bass, and we would make up rhymes and there was not always a great deal of depth to it, but to us it was very important at the time. That was our creative outlet.
I can’t underestimate the influence that culture had on me, and we would rhyme over the top of our favourite drum and bass tracks, and that was instead of access to books in the house.
Did you get any support at school?
I didn’t do very well at school at all. I don’t remember studying poetry at school. I wasn’t at school very much. One memory I have is when I got my first pay cheque from my first full time job when I was 17, maybe 18, and I thought to myself that I wanted to read. I just had this urge to read and so I bought Benjamin Zephaniah’s collection, “City Psalms”. I had a great interest in reggae music and sound system culture. I’d heard about this amazing collection of poetry and I wanted to go and find it. That was the first collection of poetry that I was interested in.
How do you develop from there?
Of course you go on to discover other poets but I suppose a big turning point for me was studying poets at university. So, my introduction to poetry, in the traditional sense, was probably from when I went back into education.
I went to Coleraine University where I studied English Literature and completed a Bachelor of Arts with Honours It was there I was introduced to the beat poets and Irish poetry especially poets writing in Irish.
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