Ten Questions

Geoffrey Philp has tagged me with a meme. So I'll play along. Perhaps I'll even learn something.


Question one: Why do you write poetry (or literature) at all?

Why does one breathe, or walk, or eat? When I write, writing is an necessary as air or food, or sex, or sunlight. What surprises me are the long years when I didn't. I write because I feel the need so to do.

Question two:

What is your favourite poem? You know, the one you'd have loved to have written, the one by whose standard you base all other works of art. If your life depended on answering this question, what poem would you suggest to the person holding the knife to your throat?

That's a question with no fixed answer. There is a universe of poetry that I love. But of the subset that I wish I'd written, Shakespeare's Sonnet XCIV ranks high. If I could write a long poem, I'd want it to be something like Walcott's 'The Schooner Flight' (as I write those words I think of Rachel Mordecai and I chanting together 'I'm just a red nigger that love the sea,/I have a sound colonial education,/I have Dutch, nigger and English in me/and either I'm nobody or I'm a nation'). Yeats's later poems also speak powerfully to me.

Question three: According to you, what is the state of poetry today? Is poetry flourishing or dying?

Both. Poetry takes a variety of forms. Some of them are constantly dying. Others constantly being born.

Question four: What kind of poetry (or literature) do you dislike, and would not consider buying?

Anything by Rod McKuen. Anything by some half-arsed 'celebrity' who thinks that a slim volume of poetry will give them credibility. Anything that's badly written.

Question five: Between the styles of Come (by Makhosana Xaba) and word speaks (by Kojo Baffoe) which do you prefer? Care to tell us why? Obviously, Makhosana and Kojo aren't required to answer this question.

I find the flow of 'word speaks' much more appealing, and much more like my own work, than 'Come'.

When the Muse deigned to visit me again, I found myself drawn to formal modes rather than free ones. I've written a lot of sonnets over the past year, and quite a few villanelles, a few haiku, and some ballades.

Question six: What was the last poetry book you bought?

The Penguin Book of the Sonnet by Phillis Levin.

Question seven: Where do you go for poetry on the web?

Nowhere. I don't look for poetry on the web.

Question eight: Do you talk poetry (or literature) with friends and family? "Hi honey -- Hey, I read this incredible poem today.

In a word: no.

Question nine: What one piece of advice would you give to a beginning poet (or writer in general)? What would you tell them to do or not to do?

I'd suggest they go to what set me to writing back in my teens: The Faber Book of Modern Verse.

Question ten: What line comes to you after the following two verses (in other words, please write the third verse -- these are spontaneous lines from me and are no part of any poem I'm writing or will be writing).

When the light from the lantern
beamed and fell upon the child,
I smiled and shut the bedroom door