Alan Morrison
Was there a poem that particularly influenced your writing at that age?
I think the first poem to really make me sit up and take notice was Wilfred Owen's ‘Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori', which we studied in an English class at school. A little later on, studying A Level Literature, I had my first real epiphany when reading Keats' hypnotic ‘Ode on Melancholy'. I think this was the poem to first inspire me to write poetry myself. It might sound superficial, but what struck me the most about the piece was the beautiful surface: his almost baroque use of language, the metaphor; the almost tangible words. Keats's poetry, for me, jumped from the page, seeming almost like a textured brocade on paper, a sort of pulsing Braille, in the same way that Van Gogh's paintings leapt out at you – I became infatuated with this extraordinary beauty of diction (only to be rivalled in my mind much later on by his Keats' inheritor, Dylan Thomas). Soon after, I discovered Blake, whose aphorismic social epigrams (which struck a particular political chord) fascinated me, chiefly due to their deceptive simplicity; he was a poet singularly capable of summoning the most powerful messages and emotions in the fewest words (I speak specifically of his Songs of Innocence and Experience). Around the same time, Shelley too, via a quote from the ‘Mask of Anarchy' on the back sleeve of – I'm again slightly embarrassed to admit - The Jam's Sound Affects LP: ‘Rise like lions after slumber/ In unvanquishable number/ Shake your chains to earth like dew/ Which in sleep had fallen on you/ Ye are many – they are few' (very erudite, Mr Weller).
Did you begin to write your own poetry about this time?
Around this time, yes, though it would be hard to say which poem came first. It's difficult to pinpoint the very first. It is between two which appear on the first page of my chronological volume, The Mansion Gardens. But as ‘Nostalgia' comes second, I assume, on some sort of unconscious predilection, it is its predecessor on the page which originated first. (‘Nostalgia', incidentally, was originally entitled ‘The Needed Food of Yesteryear' – a hopelessly mock-Keatsian title which I since, under canny advice, abandoned. It was my first attempt at a sonnet, but in time I cut it down to only the last four lines, making – I think – a memorable epigram. I remember feeling very elated and proud of the closing aphorism: ‘And why we loathe ourselves today/ Is why we loved ourselves before').
‘The Water Shallows' was probably the earliest. This piece was originally about twelve lines long. I think I cut it down to about eight or ten for its first publication in a book called Don't Think of Tigers in 2001 – but later on, and with the exceptionally focused mentoring of Simon Jenner, one of my publishers, I whittled it down to just six lines. The greatest compliment I ever had on this piece was at a poetry workshop, where someone described it as sounding like Debussy in words. That was immensely flattering, as I adore Debussy.
Do you recall how you approached this first poem? How you entered its world, so to speak? Or, to draw on another trope, did the poem come get you?
Approaching this first poem? It's impossible to say really, or to fully recall (this was about fifteen years ago now). For me it's a bit like what Stevie Smith once said to constant questions on ‘where did her poems come from'? Like her I can only say, ‘I don't know, they just come.' That may sound romantic and trite but quite often that is the case – it's something natural, not often forced, like breathing or crying; an outpouring. It starts off with the trigger of tingling excitement, which almost twitches the fingers in anticipation.