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Interviews

 
Click here to read an interview with Melissa Hunt in The Loop magazine, March 2008

Click here to read Taking the Pulse: an interview for ‘Writewords’, April 2005

Click here for Sally Carthew's interview (John Tranter/ Jacket 25)

Click here for an interview with Dmytro Drozdovskyi [Kyiv, Ukraine 2006].

 
Click here to read the interview in Acumen 59

"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."

 
 

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