Interviews
Click here to read an interview with Melissa Hunt on the nature of poetry for The Loop magazine, March 2008
Click here to read 'Taking the Pulse': an interview for Writewords on Mario's writing practice, April 2005
Click here for Sally Carthew's wide-ranging interview (John Tranter/ Jacket 25)
Click here to read Mario's response to the question 'Why do you write?', posed by the Royal Literary Fund, 2009
Click here to listen to Mario interviewed by the RSA on the Environment and Education
Click here to read an edited transcript of an interview with The Grove, Oct 2009.
... "For some, vers libre isn't so much a case of playing tennis with the net down as dispensing altogether
with balls, racquets and chalk. But is free verse genuinely 'formless'? Is it that poets such as myself are somehow
prosodically dyslexic or (worse) lazy, or that recognisable/ recognised form attracts acknowledgement and value?
There's something I call 'formal prejudice': the assumption that overt form automatically improves a work...
What if the occasion demands not a 'tight' piece, but something with language-juices freely haemorrhaging?"
... "With modernism, I do enjoy the intellectual and linguistic rigour, the endeavour; but, even at its most bleak
or experimental, modernist poetry is founded on generosity, on a foundation stone of gift as well as of quest.
An essential part of that gift is the form you choose for it. Sometimes, a standard vessel works best; other times,
you must cast it yourself. Done well, they're both aspects of the craft, of the soul."
FURTHER INFORMATION copyright mario petrucci
2001
Click here for Mario being asked about how he approaches poetry, the 'rules' of poetry, war, science and Chernobyl (Dmytro Drozdovskyi, Ukraine 2006)
What is language in poetry, and how does it write us? Is our collective imagination in shortfall? What are 'poetries' - and is the market destroying them?
Click here to read the interview in Acumen 59 ...
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BOOKINGS