This interview with me was originally requested by Limebirds, in 2014. That site no longer exists, so I thought I would share it here for those who would like to know more about me and my work.

Looking at your blog you have had a very busy and varied career, can you tell us a bit about your background and how you became a poet?

I was brought up on a council estate in a working class family. Books were very expensive but valued. Mum was a great storyteller. I was mad for story and this gave me the incentive to teach myself to read at the age of 3. I was a voracious reader and used to go to the library twice a week. I was making up rhymes all the time, and it didn’t take me long to discover poetry. I wanted to be a poet even back…

This first poem is by the marvellous Penelope Shuttle, who tells me a distant cousin of hers, Pearl Shuttle, failed to survive the sinking of Titanic. She was on her way to America to start a career in the vaudeville.

Mighty Ship of Pride

I built this ship

from the iron of my father’s eyes

the steel of my mother’s heart

Three million rivets

I built this ship

from the bones and the skin

the hours and the days

I built it by hand

on a 49 hour week

for pay of  two pound

I built it from tongues

of the wise and the foolish

I hammered

I wrought

How fast she grew

my ship of woe

 

I built this ship

from the nettles

in the yard

by the nuns’ parlour

from streets

of a stricken city

torn between pride

and grief

I built this ship

from leftover rivers

As well as passengers, the crew and staff also lost their lives in the disaster. The courage of the musicians on the Titanic has been noted. There were two bands, but they formed together to keep passengers calm during the crisis. They were not employees of The White Star Line, and so had no rights. Not a single one survived. Their music probably saved many lives and kept up everyone’s spirits.

Poet and musician Kim Moore remembers how Wallace Hartley, band leader mentioned in my poem yesterday, was found with his violin strapped to his back. Many thanks to Kim, whose excellent blog you can find from the link to the right.

Wallace Hartley

And when he was found, still in his uniform,
his violin strapped to his back, people began
to remember the way he’d played each night,
not just the last, the dip and turn of his shoulders

The sinking of The Titanic on her maiden voyage in 1912 continues to fascinate people. The story unfolds like a Greek tragedy and has been the subject of many poems, both at the time and since. The ship sank 104 years ago and laws were changed afterwards, such as enough lifeboats for everyone. The worst casualties were among third class passengers setting off for a new life in America, many of them Irish. Cruelly, women and children were split from husbands and fathers by the old rule ‘women and children first’, even where there was room in the lifeboats. Abigail Wyatt writes about the widows of the Titanic. 

Over the next few days, I will be featuring some contemporary poems and prose pieces about it. Thanks are due to their authors for allowing me to publish their work.

Atlantic Widows

We come to it in our different ways – just…

People do the most amazing things. They become concubines. They learn to live with their fate. They go to work. They sit in the wood. And when these things get into poems… the ones who sit in the wood turn into trees. Geraldine Green’s poem All Day ISit in the Woods, and Jennifer A. McGowan’s Pharaoh’s Concubine, bring us these particular insights into people and their surroundings through poetry.

In The Work Ethic, Democracy tries to go to work.  In new guidance from our not very caring State, I have this week learned that the sick note has now been renamed the fit note. Think on this, Owen Gallagher of The Work Ethic.

Nothing is too strange to happen in narrative, and narrative poetry. Some of the stories become myths. We finish with a narrating of a myth in Rayne Mackinnon’s poem Orpheus, in which…

Carol Ann Duffy allegedly used them to paper her smallest room. But that’s not so easy these days when so many of them come by email.
I used to save all my handwritten ones, together with the poems I’d sent out, but life’s too short to do that. In the past, editors like Peter Mortimer, of the long defunct Iron magazine, used to type feedback letters and tell the poet what he liked and didn’t like about the poems. Very few editors these days have the time and energy for that, because so many more people are submitting poetry. Bless the ones who do!

Many rejections take the form of a standard letter, offering generic advice. Sometimes they can come across as patronising, especially to people who have been submitting poetry, with both positive and negative results for many years. One size never fits all, and I would urge editors…