Out With the Old | Poetry | Eric Gregory Awards 2011

“that’s one fucker of a fucker, eh?”

“Aye, man, you took the words right out of my mouth.”

-Niall Campbell

Last week was an important time in the world of poetry, for we saw the announcement of this year’s Eric Gregory Award winners who were, if you do not already know, Holly Hopkins, Niall Campbell, Tom Chivers, Martin Jackson and Kim Moore.

I had the pleasure of attending the traditional winners’ reading, hosted in the Betsey Trotwood by Roddy Lumsden.

As regular readers of this blog will know, I go to a lot of poetry events of all shapes and sizes, and as a result I feel that I have developed a fairly keen ear for what works and what does not.

I say this as if it is a hard skill to master; it isn’t. If you can let a week pass after seeing a poet for the first time and still remember something impressive about their reading, then what they are doing works. It really is as simple as that for me. Last Wednesday’s reading was that rare thing of a live event where everyone’s set lodged itself in my perforated memory fairly vividly.

I have known Tom Chivers and Holly Hopkins for long enough not to have been surprised by how well they read (Tom’s crowning moment was probably his masterful inclusion of the calculator-friendly word, ‘boobless’ in a poem and Holly infuriatingly read one of the most beautiful nuptial poems I have ever heard at a point in my life when I am desperately trying to write something for a friend’s wedding).

The other three were a pleasant revelation however. Kim Moore’s mixture of youthful energy and dry sense of humour made for an entertaining end to the opening section. In listening to her describe the interior of a Wetherspoons pub whilst evoking Dante’s Inferno, I felt a slight kindred spirit with the many hours I have spent poetically dissecting life in a public house.

She finished with a hilarious piece about what happens to poets when they retire, how they will look at a beautiful night sky and no longer feel obliged to construct metaphors. The piece almost read as if it could be Philip Larkin’s letter declining the post of poet laureate in 1984.

Martin Jackson filled the stage with a very different type of energy. Just as memorable as his poetry were the brief beguiling snapshots of his life given between poems. Jackson appears to evoke everything that we want our writers to be – handsome, busy-minded folk living in houses with wardrobes propped up with discarded early drafts and shelves full of books with the covers ripped off.

The last poet to read was Niall Campbell, a writer introduced with much glee by his fellow Scotsman, Lumsden (they both celebrated Campbell being the first Scot to win a Gregory in 16 years by downing a glass of Scotch on stage before the reading).

Campbell’s poetry was worth the wait however. His voice is that of a small-town boy who can see the big picture and his ability to imbue the minutiae of a remote life with a profound universality puts me in mind of Michael Longley.

In the past, the Eric Gregory awards have proved a fairly sound prophecy of the people who will go on to achieve great things in the world of poetry. If the five people who read last Wednesday are where poetry is heading, then I can sleep easy tonight knowing that we are in safe hands.

It is a real honour to be part of a group that hosts such talented new writers and I look forward to bringing you new work by some of this year’s Gregory Winners in Silkworms' exciting imminent rebirth this year.

Phil Brown

Poetry Editor

L | Commentary | Roddy Lumsden

“The elderly schoolmasters and piano-teachers are dust, 

and the leaves of the piano primer were eaten, note by note, by dust.”

Chris McCully, Dust

“Not here, the darkness in this twittering world.”

T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton

Note: I have not reproduced Lumsden's poems in this article, but they can be found by clicking here.


Those who admire Lumsden’s work, but know little of his life, may be interested to know that he used to make his money from pub quiz machines. This is an interesting fact about a man who was once financially reliant on interesting facts. It is not the image of a man, stood alone, plying pound coins from the cold dead grasp of a machine that fascinates us though – it is the gestalt effect of the myriad anecdotes that lead the man to his wealth of tidbits.

In fact, Danny Boyle rather smugly turned this concept into one of the most successful films of all time in Slumdog Millionaire. A knowledgeable man is an admirable thing, but it is the tales of this knowledge-acquisition that leaves us spellbound.

This is the premise for Lumsden’s poems, Olivier and A Localised History of Dry Precipitation; the man of facts begins to map out snippets of autobiography behind a façade of trivia. Olivier opens with a misdirection, a clarification and a parenthetical anecdote, the role of the raconteur firmly established from the off:

‘He married eighty three times, eighty of them in the West

End run of The Good Husband (by playwright Alexander

Morris, who later shot himself and his chocolate Lab – ‘une

bufe brune’, which survived – in the Place de la Bastille).’

Lumsden paints a portrait of an actor at his most idiosyncratic and human in a way that transcends the digital generation’s need for its icons to bare bullet-pointed plot points in lives defined by their most public moments:

“He considered calling all his children after the heroines

from the novels of Colette, but had only sons.”

But the pay-off of the poem is in its restraint – for any such anecdotes require verifiable sources. Lumsden provides this in the penultimate line with the centrifugal clause ‘he told my father’. Following this is Olivier’s only chance to speak for himself in the poem, yet we scarcely care because it is the father, not the celebrity, that we now yearn to hear of.

As I have already stated however, this poem finds its basis in misdirection – one gets so swept up in the acquisition of anecdotes and new information that we scarcely think to question who the titular ‘Olivier’ is or, as he later calls himself, ‘Mr. Oliver’. It soon becomes clear that we are not dealing with the same man who married Vivien Leigh, so who is it? Is it a friend of the poet’s father, or is it a re-imagined version of Laurence Olivier, told through vivid, yet apocryphal accounts?

Such questions carry over to A Localised History of Dry Precipitation, the poet’s account of his father’s fascination with dust particles. In the poem, Lumsden draws implied parallels between the amateur scientific, investigatory work of a father figure and his own career as a writer:

‘Such elegance of

phrase, such turns in which, we must assume, his

best self lives on.’

When Lumsden sent this poem to Silkworms Ink for our 50^th Chapbook, he was very clear that it absolutely had to be justified (ie. the left hand and right hand edges of the text needed to be a straight line. Word processors achieve this illusion by making minute adjustments to the spaces between words... to illustrate, this paragraph and the next one are justified).

There are a number of potential reasons for this structural choice – the one I would plump for, however, is our old friend, misdirection. Justifying a poem with tight margins, marooned in the middle of a page, creates the illusion of impenetrability and the idea that all the elements are somehow perfectly aligned. On closer inspection however, we literally spot the gaps.

Which has me thinking that maybe left-right justification should be more prevalent in modern poetry than it currently is. Does it not serve the same purpose as rhyme, but on a visual level? In both rhyme and left-right justification, the poet is creating the illusion that things are congruent, that they are equivalent, that they are comparable. The façade of order; poetry. I digress.

By the time we have read of an ‘Olivier’ who is not what he seems, we instinctively distrust our narrator and look to distil the truths from the fiction – not that we can only enjoy poetry as autobiography, but these poems are laced with so many fascinating facts that we yearn desperately for them to be real. Luckily, the sections on the derivation of ‘abacus’ and ‘khaki’ were bang on the money.

Truthful or otherwise, this poem represents the best of Lumsden’s ability as a tentative conjurer of scenes. I have read the following six lines around fifty times since we issued our 50^th Chapbook on Wednesday; there is something mesmerising in the way that Lumsden’s attention to detail sucks the reader into the father’s attention to detail in the poem in some beautiful meta mise-en-abyme:

‘close, the micrometer’s divinings, a sweep for

fragments and filings on the unused kitchen

worktop, a licked finger cosseting the length of a

tabletop, a welcome mat flipped and shaken above

an underlit screen.’

One imagines that Lumsden’s experience of quiz machines has been a defining force in his approach to writing poems (as well as the quizzes he now writes for others). Like quizzes, his poems wilfully mislead, they challenge us and force us to question long-held truths, yet never at the expense of us having a good time.

All of Lumsden’s poems featured on this site are taken from his forthcoming collection, Terrific Melancholy, which I eagerly look forward to reading and can be pre-ordered here.

Phil Brown

Poetry Editor

Radio | Poetry | Open Cast Surgery

“Radio is cleaning up the nation.”

-Elvis Costello

My teaching timetable this year has taken me out of the comfortable fireside of literature into the cold operating theatre of linguistics. I was initially troubled by this shift away from the subjective sensitivity that I spent three undergraduate years honing as I recently began to acquire the clinical skills of language-studies.

My fears were soon put aside for the re-ignition of my childhood fascination with the idea of a ‘fair test’. You spend years in secondary school playing with this idea. ‘Why wasn’t this a fair test? What could you have done to lessen the variables? Why are your results fundamentally moot?’

The linguist’s lab is rife with unclampable variables. The sands of semantics are constantly shifting, with many dictionary definitions reaching obsolescence before even going to print. The English language’s internationally plunderous nature makes it idiomatic and, with the internet’s erosion of the barriers between modal conventions, measuring its dimensions is like trying to use a 30cm ruler to scale a melting ice cap.

Then there’s ethics – how far can we go to determine the science behind these chunks of breath we use to share our brains’ contrivances? I’m thinking here of what linguists refer to as The Forbidden Experiment. The only way to prove Chomsky’s idea that language is innate would be to shove a baby in a silent, unlit chamber and see if it started talking. It could theoretically bury the tabula rasa for good, but it would mean that you, the license payer, allowed scientists to abuse an innocent child. How could you?

And so these endless thoughts of fair tests have followed me back to the bookshop. It is impossible to give a fair reading of a poem, in the scientific sense. The actual words used are just one layer to the poem’s reception; there are just too many variables in place. This is not an exhaustive list, but here are some of the key distractions/detractors that come between you and the words of a poem:

On the page…

1. What publishing house is this collection released from?
2. What font are the poems written in?
3. How has the blurb/bio been written?
4. What poets have donated quotations of recommendation for the cover?
5. What illustrations have been used on the cover?
6. Where did you find this book and did you have to pay for it?
7. Is there much background noise in the place where you are trying to read this poem?
8. Seriously, how loud does that kid on the bus need to have his headphones? The whole top deck can hear Kings of Leon emanating from his dirty white ear plugs.
9. What sort of press-shot has the poet gone for? Are you kidding me? A glass of wine? And a raised eyebrow? Christ.
10. How thick is the collection?
11. Nice paper?
12. How old is the poem? Is the poet alive?
13. Any ye olde language to be dealing with?
14. What was your English teacher in High School like?

On the stage…

1. What sort of event are you seeing this poet at? Open mic? Guest spot? Book launch?
2. Are they doing the poetry voice? Oh god, they aren’t doing the poetry slam voice are they? With the hand gestures too?
3. Do you find this person physically attractive?
4. How confident are they?
5. How much time does the poet spend introducing each poem? Have they just spent 20 minutes telling you about an obscure tribal tradition they found out about on their gap year?
6. What sort of company are you with?
7. Is the rest of the room enjoying the poet? Have they earned that rare thing of applause for an actual poem rather than a polite clap at the end of a set?
8. Is there free wine at this thing?
9. Are you distracted by the sound of bar staff muttering to each other?
10. Is the poet younger than you?

The lists of distractions could go on for hundreds of nuanced pages, perhaps separated into ‘social’, ‘linguistic’, ‘ambient’ and ‘subliminal’ factors to name a few. But we aren’t ever going to get rid of the countless barriers between you and an enjoyable poem, so why think about them?

Well, the radio (and its descendents) represents the closest thing to a fair test we are likely to get in poetry. When poetry is allowed to vibrate the air around a wireless we have a far more democratic process that that of a crowded reading, or a poorly produced book, or a badly lit YouTube video.

Granted, poets on the radio are still only as palatable as their voices allow, and the quality of microphone and the reputation of the station is a factor - but so fewer variables exist when considering the medium of radio broadcast; a medium which allowed Dylan Thomas to reach a far greater audience than he might have by virtue of his written words alone. But then he had the sort of voice needed to sell such aurally complex pieces, so perhaps my argument does not stand.

What the radio has done however, is lay the ground for my generation’s most underappreciated, free-at-point-of-service commodity; the Podcast. And if poetry does not embrace and thrive as part of ‘podmanity’ then it is a shameful missed opportunity.

The precedent is set with one of the finest regular podcasts available – Classic Poetry Aloud.  Those who are unaware of the existence of this vast and beautiful resource need to spend the next three hours getting lost in its archives. The reader, who chooses to remain anonymous, reads a different poem every week with his impeccably clear and tentative delivery.

For me, this is poetry at its most democratic – read by a consistent, nameless voice, with the sole motive of delivering beautiful words to anyone willing to listen. Many of my undergraduate nights were spent wandering the streets of Leamington or the endless footpaths of Warwick campus, listening to the impassioned delivery of poems from Blake to Verlaine.

Chomsky loves it

But for financial reasons, this podcast is only able to supply work that is now out of copyright. This is helpful in so much as you are guaranteed works which have stood the test of time, but the modern mainstream needs to awaken to the power of the podcast and its untapped potential for making people truly love poems rather than buying poets.

Reading this, who would not make a point of downloading a weekly CarcanetCast, or FaberCast where a member of the editorial team picks a poem from their stable to share with the world? I know that I would subscribe to hearing Roddy Lumsden record a rendition of his favourites from the Salt line-up once a week. Or to hear Neil Astley work his way through Bloodaxe’s back catalogue.

Not only would this help spread awareness of some of the sparkling talents that flit from renown due to poor marketing budgets or lack of bookshop stocking, but it would help kindle that most precious thing in poetry-world; an audience. And let us not forget here – for producer and consumer alike – podcasts are free.

Now perhaps I only argue this case in the hope of sparking off a product that I want to exist, but I know that what I’m suggesting makes sense. With the smallest of financial investments, the finest poets and publishers of poetry can easily drip their beautiful words into the ears of commuters, teenagers, teachers and scientists, and anybody else who thinks that they are too busy to sit down and read the stuff.

Phil Brown

Poetry Editor

Wider Reading | Days of Roses Anthology

"All that really mattered then was that I was a man..."

The name Days of Roses is taken from a Tom Waits song in which a man phones an old flame in his twilight years for one last reminiscence of things lost. I’ve no doubt that Waits would be happy to have his lyrics used for the recent poetry anthology, not least of all because it had its launch last night in the sort of sweaty, dimly lit, cramped, underground pub that would appeal to his beatnik heart.

As well as the body heat and the smell of incense, what immediately hit me upon arriving at the Day of Roses  launch was what a socially comfortable event the night was. This may seem like an odd thing to point out in a literary review, but as someone who has been to a lot of readings, I cannot over-emphasize the importance of making your guests feel that they are in capable hands when hosting a live event. You will not find a better example of how to make this work than attending a Days of Roses event.

So, for the uninitiated, Days of Roses is a monthly poetry-reading event that has been running for a little over two years in various fine drinking establishments across the land. The list of previous performers is an impressive thing to behold, including some of my favourites; Sam Riviere, Roddy Lumsden, Jack Underwood, Heather Phillipson, Jon Stone, Ross Sutherland, Tom Chivers, Todd Swift, James Brookes and Emily Hasler.

As they pass the two-year mark, the team behind these events have put together a beautiful anthology of some of their favourite performers. It is clear that the same amount of care and pleasure went into the production of their anthology as goes into the hosting of their nights; the books are hand bound by co-editor, Malene Engelund, the cover includes one of fifteen photographs and pieces of art by Ross McNicol and Amelia Newton Whitelaw and, if I’m not very much mistaken, are typeset in Perpetua, the absolute king of fonts for printing poetry*.

As seems to be the case with every other modern anthology, the Days of Roses team make a selling point of their diversity. Whereas some anthologists will use ‘diversity’ as a way of masking their lack of coherence, I feel that the range of styles to be found in this collection is reconcilable with the high quality of the writing throughout. The beauty of the Days of Roses anthology concept, is that by framing it as an artefact of a live reading, the reader will read it whilst imagining a performance, which makes the diverse range of registers and voices refreshing rather than confusing.

Two particular highlights of the anthology are Maximilian Hildebrand’s wittily bleak Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle:

“So I’m outside in the garden

And it’s just me and the bugs

And they don’t mind

So I light up a ciggie at the

Second attempt and cough

A couple of times to know I’m a smoker

And it’s a desperate profession

And I think to myself

This is living alright…”

and Lydia Macpherson’s Pastoral:

“The wireless bleats

spring is here and look

the chewing gum is blooming

lichen on city pavements

in the river shopping trolleys

are mating at rusty angles

welding in the petrol spills…”

Beyond this, the anthology, and its launch night, is/was also greatly enhanced by the ever mesmerising Liz Berry (follow the link for a review I did of her debut pamphlet last year) and this year’s Costa Prize winner, Jo Shapcott (who has provided an exclusive new poem called The Elements as the book’s opening).

Whilst the fact that you are reading this strongly suggests that you missed the event itself, I recommend you try to pick yourself up a copy of the Days of Roses anthology by e-mailing the days of roses team while supplies last, or wait a couple of weeks for it to come out on Amazon.

*For more information on the virtues of Perpetua, please e-mail James Brookes, who will happily write you an essay on the topic.

Phil Brown

Poetry Editor

Biography | Poetry | Bio-Gravy

In a way that reflects our current political culture, people don’t buy poetry anymore, they buy poets. I think this is best exemplified in the recent generational anthology, Identity Parade. People love bitching about this book for various reasons but I think it is fair to say that it does a very competent and necessary job of giving poetry outsiders, outer-insiders and newcomers an accessible introduction to contemporary British poetry.

What instantly sets it apart from its predecessor, The New Poetry, is the way that the good people at Bloodaxe have put biographies to the fore; every poet’s contribution is preceded by a photograph and some biographical (and in some cases critical) notes.  Compare this to its  1993 predecessor, which had all biographical notes squeezed into nine pages at the end as an appendix rather than a visual show-stealer.

I personally do not enjoy the latest format, as it makes the reading experience seem fragmented and encourages the reader to thumb through to the poet with the most interesting face and bio-notes.  It all seems indicative of a reading public who places too much importance on a poet’s spiel rather than letting the words speak for themselves, but then in an anthology composed largely of poets with only one collection to their name, sometimes spiel can be the difference between healthy sales and obscurity.

I am also well aware that lots of people much prefer this style of presenting the poems, and my lack of interest in the poets’ biographies and photographs is simply a matter of taste.

I do find the modern poets’ biographies fascinating though. Let’s have a quick peek at Siân Hughes’ bio from her excellent debut collection, The Missing (read it if you haven’t already, it is one of the finest collections of 2009):

“Siân Hughes is a lone parent who lives in the middle of nowhere with her two young children and works part time as a teacher and in a book shop/ café. In 2006 she won the Arvon International Poetry Competition with The Send Off, an elegy for her third child.”

So, conventionally enough, we have a mention of an award. This is undeniably important when convincing the customer that a debut collection is worth reading. We also have a mention of the tragic loss that has influenced some of Hughes’ poetry. Again, this is essential in establishing some indication as to a poet’s subject matter.

What really sticks out to me though, is that phrase ‘lone parent’. It makes me wonder if this was a phrase suggested by Hughes herself, or the marketing team at Salt. When we read that a woman is a ‘lone parent’, there is automatically that semantic tentacle that flails towards the more conventional phrase ‘single mother’.

So why ‘lone parent’ and not ‘single mother’? Is it because of class associations? Or because ‘single’ has associations of looking for a partner? Or because ‘parent’ is not anchored to gender and therefore implies somebody playing both roles? Or is it because ‘lone parent’ has that sense of someone standing tall against adversity, working two jobs to make end’s meet whilst somehow managing to write some award winning poetry, where as ‘single mother’ has been semantically glued by the Daily Mail to a bunch of benefit leaches?

Either way, this is a prime example of the biography as a fleeting opportunity for a poet to win you over with their ‘story’, especially early on in their career. There is also a small trend within debut collection bio's to offer seemingly innocuous pieces of information in the final sentence:

“She currently lives in Norwich.”

from Metrophobia by Stephanie Leal

“She has travelled and worked in Central America, particularly Mexico.”

from The Secret by Zoe Brigley

“At the chess board, as in life, he defends – even when not besieged.”

from Dream of the Condom by Nicholas Swingler

Actually, I quite like that last one. The point is though, that biographies on debut collections are such a strange art. You have to make it either deliberately sparse, consciously quirky, unashamedly braggy or somehow imbued with an attractive enough sense of mystery for the reader to bite and want to find out more.

In an age where most collections are festooned with a press-shot, we must accept that whatever blurb to our lives we offer in biographies will be read in tandem with what our face looks like… like a social networking site on a bookshelf. In this sense, I feel that biographies now must all be written with the photograph in mind, like some capitalist strand of ekphrasis, drafted and redrafted until we have a perfect combination of words and image to give us the appearance of being someone that you want to read.

Phil Brown

Poetry Editor

Phil Brown was born in Redhill in 1987. From ages 7-11 he performed to captivated audiences at the school ‘Book Character Event’ where he performed as, in order, Just William, Hogarth (from The Iron Man), The Riddler and Nick from Brandon Robshaw’s ‘The Amazing Adventures of Raincoat Man’. He quit this tradition whilst at the top of his game, and has since become an English teacher.

Comics | Poetry | Interview with Jon Stone

Last Sunday I had the pleasure of interviewing the poet, editor and gentleman, Jon Stone on the topic of comic-books, poetry and 'The New Seriousness'. Enjoy.

Interview Conducted 17th October 2010

Phil Brown: Good evening Jon Stone, could you briefly introduce yourself to our readers and let us know what it is that you do?

Jon Stone: Hi, I'm Jon, and I'm a poet and editor. With fellow poet Kirsten Irving, I run the arts journal, Fuselit, and a relatively new poetry press called Sidekick Books, which publishes (thus far) themed micro-anthologies.

I have a pamphlet out called 'Scarecrows' with Happenstance Press, and I'm working on a full collection for Salt.

Phil Brown: We were lucky enough at Silkworms to put out a chapbook of your work earlier this year which was themed around comic books... what drew you towards that topic?

Jon Stone: I've been a comic reader since I was small, when comics were still stocked in most newsagents. I'm not a huge fanatic in the grand scale of things, but I certainly read them and get a lot out of the various sub-genres. Recently, with my writing, I've decided that I should be using it to engage with everything I think worth engaging with - ie. not writing things off as not really suitable for poetry - so comics is one of things I've been trying to engage with and explore.

Phil Brown: In terms of boiling down information and ideas into the smallest space available, do you feel that there is a relationship between the comic panel and the poetic line?

Jon Stone: Hm. There are parallels but I'm not sure the parallels are stronger than between, say, poetry and song or comics and film. But yes, poems use textual information in a similar way to how well written comics use visual information - getting rid of the 'noise' and trying to express something as clearly as possible in a tightly controlled space. There's the aspect of arrangement as well, of course.

Phil Brown: Can you think of a specific comic book that 'won you over' to the art form at a young age?

Jon Stone: At a young age, I was reading the UK Marvel Transformers comics and 2000AD. Both of those won me over, in that as well as being hooked on them, they struck me as much more powerful than, say, cartoons or Hardy Boys novels.

It was the kind of thing that you felt in some way you shouldn't be allowed to read. Both had a feeling of being 'adult'. (That may seem like a strange thing to say about Transformers, but they were ripping each others' heads off!)

Phil Brown: I certainly share that experience of comic books being a source of 'adult themes' in a medium which parents, often naively, see as being 'safe' for children to read.

Jon Stone: Yes, there was a sense of someone having found a loophole, a way to bypass the protection around children.

Phil Brown: 2000AD is certainly a series which gives its readers the chance to explore a whole mythology surrounding the characters... do you enjoy that element to the comic series?

Jon Stone: Yes, although it's also something of an albatross. Someone picking up 2000AD for the first time can easily get lost among these sprawling mythologies. I like the simplicity of Judge Dredd, in that although it has a mythology, it also still revolves around an extremely simple concept. The writers don't spend too much time dredging up characters from the past or getting lost in continuity.

That's actually something a lot of 2000AD strips have over, say, Marvel's output, which is far too tied up in its own increasingly complicated universe.

Phil Brown: You admire the Judge Dredd series for being able to stand alone, despite being part of a much wider universe. Do you feel that, on some level, this has informed your approach to writing poetry?

Jon Stone: I couldn't rule it out! If anything, I think that idea is even more crucial in poetry, where there's such a disparity in experience between different readers. And poems, of course, can be informed by so many different contexts. Ultimately, they do have to stand up on their own because you can't control the direction a reader is coming from.

Phil Brown: In one of my favourite poems of yours, you write a monologue from the point-of-view of a bob-a-job henchman from the Batman universe, currently in the employ of The Scarecrow. Is there a story behind how this poem came about?

Jon Stone: Not a very interesting one, I'm afraid! I wanted to write something about Scarecrow - he's my favourite villain from Batman. I wanted to articulate what it was that I liked about the character. When I get a hankering like this, I usually have to wait around for a while for an original angle. Eventually, one turned up while I was reading a Harley Quinn comic. One of the henchmen characters in it talked about having 'henched' for all the major villains, and I realised it never occurred to me that these faceless 'goon' characters could actually be moving around between bosses.

The form, incidentally, was supposed to be a French 'chanson' like the Song of Roland, but I misremembered the rules (which often happens!) There was supposed to be an ironic contrast between the heroic 'mode of telling' and the villainous subject matter.

Phil Brown: The Scarecrow is a character that forces all of his victims to come face to face with whatever they fear most. Do you think he would make a good creative writing tutor?

Jon Stone: Yes, up until the point where he murders his students. They won't learn anything from that.

Phil Brown: You mention that your poem 'Henching for Jonathan Crane' is a chanson of sorts... do you generate a lot of writing from experimenting with classical forms?

Jon Stone: I wouldn't say 'a lot' but definitely some. I sort of go through cycles - for a while, I'll be keen on reusing and adapting classical forms, of which there are many more than the usual suspects. Then I'll go through a phase of wanting to invent or use newer, weirder forms, which is something that really should be done more. Then I'll have a period of reacquainting myself with the delights of free verse.

Phil Brown: Have you invented any fixed forms of which you are particularly proud?

Jon Stone: There's one I've invented but which I haven't managed to use properly yet, which is the barbarelle. It's named after Barbarella. Just as Jane Fonda famously 'stripped in space', the idea of the barbarelle is that something be 'shed' each stanza, be it a line, a metric foot or otherwise. But the better ones generally don't have names - they're just rules that come up during the composition of the poem that I then stick to. Currently I'm writing a sequence of sonnets collaged out of 'fake' or counterfeit texts.

I am quite excited about something I am trying to pioneer at the moment called 'migrating rhyme'. I'm using it in a sequence of poems which all end with the word 'over'. The idea is that you alternately use consonant rhyme and vowel rhyme - maybe with some fuzzy rhyme - so that every line rhymes with the one before and after it, but that the actual sound of the rhyme changes continuously throughout the poem.

And I like the domino one we put in our 'Bard Games' book as well. It's two line stanzas, where the first line of each stanza is a homophone of the second line of the previous stanza. Like how you play dominoes.

Phil Brown: Your taste in forms seems to be geared towards making things play out for longer... to keep things progressing... do you feel that you would end up writing much shorter poems without the machine of form spurring you on?

Jon Stone: It's actually the opposite. Form is a confinement that generally keeps me from going on too long. It forces me to use greater economy. I have a tendency to go almost stream-of-consciousness with free verse poems (in 'Thra-koom', look at the length of 'Gambit' as opposed to, say, 'Dearest Wolverine')

I've actually been using a form invented by Roddy Lumsden recently, which specifically keeps you to eight lines.

Phil Brown: You mention Roddy Lumsden... he is just one of a massive list of poets who you have collaborated with on various projects... when did you begin engaging with poetry as a community?

Jon Stone: It was after we started putting events on in London when it really kicked in, I think. People came to our events and we went to theirs, and I just found there were a lot of writers whose work I was interested in. It almost seems unnatural to me, in this kind of environment, to not want to work together in some way. My whole lifestyle, in this regard, is very influenced by 'ensemble' fiction, as opposed to the Harry Potter narrative, where one guy is the best at everything.

I prefer to see myself as part of a team or group than as some sort of protagonist.

Phil Brown: You are perhaps one of the most collaboratively inclined people in the London scene at the moment... is this why you have so many poetry projects based on the internet?

Jon Stone: Partly, but the internet thing is also because I'm much better at quietly putting something together in my front room than socialising! I'd love to do more in the way of events and live collaboration but it's much more difficult for me.

The internet combines cheapness and semi-permanence, meaning you can experiment more freely and the results stick around for a while.

Phil Brown: You say that you would like to be seen as part of a team or group rather than as a protagonist... How do you feel about Todd Swift's recent article in which he describes you as part of what he refers to as 'The New Seriousness' movement?

Jon Stone: Well, I'm in good company, but I wonder if the word 'seriousness' is slightly intimidating to people and makes us look like we have ideas above our station! Obviously, I liked very much that he said we sound 'like the future', and in a way, he's right - I do have ideas above my station! I definitely take things quite seriously. Kirsty knows better than anyone how melodramatic I can be about poetry ...

Phil Brown: Looking at the other poets on that list, do you feel that there is an identifiable 'movement' between you?

Jon Stone: I'm not so sure about that. I think poets are far too individualistic to be grouped into any kind of movement at the moment - although that said, movements can be built around their own naming. If the idea of 'the new seriousness' takes off, or influences each of us, or people beyond us, it could well become realised. But James Brookes, for example, is a very different writer to me, I think, and although I have things in common with him, I also have things in common with many of the poets in the other groups Todd identified.

Phil Brown: Although it is an intrinsic part of modern behaviour, it seems that since the recent Bloodaxe anthology, 'Identity Parade', was released, there is a sluice of list-making and alternative generation-defining... Do you think it is possible to define a generation whilst you are still in the middle of it?

Jon Stone: Yes. I mean, definitions aren't necessarily right or wrong. They're an interpretation or a way of sorting. Your definitions and lists become 'right' if they successfully pervade people's consciousness - if people, in essence, adopt them - and I don't know how exactly that happens. People should continue trying to do it though, because if you do hit on a successful system of definition or categorization, that creates an entry point for a whole new audience.

Phil Brown: And movements always have a healthy way of spawning counter-movements... can you imagine what a poet would have to do if they were to try to write in the exact opposite way to you

Jon Stone: Interesting question! I guess they would try to write the same or similar poem every time and not read other poets for fear of being too influenced by them. They would avoid any sign of patterning in and between their poems and stick very tightly to the dominant poetic subjects.

They'd also write one poem at a time ...

... and never go back to a poem once it's written and discarded. Their writing would generally be directed towards producing only a few 'absolute best' poems out of hundreds of failed attempts, and the designated 'best' would be the ones that go down best with other people and peers.

Phil Brown: So, finally… Poetry is a world which often seems to have far more writers than readers... what do you think is the best motivation for trying to make the transition from 'someone who has written some poems' to getting your work out there and becoming part of Poetry-World?

Jon Stone: The best motivation? That's kind of asking for a moral judgement and I'm happy to make it! I think the best motivation is wanting to engage - not just with other people but with problems and with subject matter. So as an extension of wanting to talk to each other, wanting to talk and listen. In that way, poetry is one of things that enables us to become something other than a consumer, or slightly advanced computer, or other depressing terms that seem to define our limited purpose.

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Phil Brown

Poetry Editor