I am pleased to bring to you an interview with one of the best poets in the south west. Regular readers of this blog will know Chrissy Banks. I have reviewed her latest collection and I interviewed her eight years ago. Since then she has published a superb collection, The Uninvited, read all over the south west and been published in too many anthologies and magazines to list.
Tell
us about the new book
The
Uninvited is the first
collection I’ve published since Days
of Fire and Flood in 2005. The
title refers to the way life offers unexpected, uncalled for events,
welcome or unwelcome, that change us when we are forced to engage
with them. Love and loss are part of this process, but also poems
dealing with a sense of bewilderment, fear, conflict or spiritual
drought that has to be faced. It might not sound like it, but there
is a fair amount of humour along the way, and ultimately I think,
finding acceptance to what is irreversible is key.
The
book is published by Indigo Dreams, who are a great independent press
in Devon with a really impressive line-up of poets and the best front
covers anywhere, largely designed by Ronnie Goodyer, who runs the
press with Dawn Bauling. They are true professionals and very
supportive.
Why
Poetry?
Pablo
Neruda said this lovely thing in his poem, ‘Poetry’ about
starting to write poetry. Poetry found him, he says - ‘there
I was without a face/and it touched me’
and ‘something started in my
soul/ fever or forgotten wings’. The
whole poem is such a marvellous expression of the way poetry becomes
not just something you have
to do but something with which you have a vital relationship.
Also
I think poetry is the best form of literature for reaching whatever
waits just out of consciousness both personally for each poet and in
a broader way – the zeitgeisty stuff. Look at how just in the last
year or more poems about sexuality, mental health and male violence
to women have been pushing out into poetry magazines and readings in
significant numbers. Fiona Benson’s Vertigo
and Ghost, which speaks so
eloquently and forcefully on these themes,
has just won the Forward Prize
for Best Collection, arguably the top award for poetry in the UK.
How
has the poetry business/scene changed over your life?
It’s
changed enormously. The web has seen to that. Since I first started
writing, there has been a growing proliferation of poetry magazines
and online journals, of small presses, of competitions and poetry
awards, of Creative Writing programmes and online poetry courses.
Poetry now is much more inclusive and international, no longer is the
white, male academic automatically favoured. Perhaps what’s changed
most of all is the growth and popularity of spoken word poems and
their exposure on social media and via the many spoken word events
that have sprung up nationwide.
I’m
not sure what it’s like in other parts of the country, but here in
the south west the open mic rules. It’s great to hear such a
variety of voices and to know everyone can have an audience for their
poems. But I have a certain nostalgia for the days when a poetry
reading consisted of one or two poets, usually published and often
well known, reading for maybe two sets of twenty or thirty minutes
each. It wasn’t always an evening well spent, but there was an
incentive then to put your own writing aside and just listen to
someone else, become absorbed in another person’s concerns, their
images and rhythms for a sustained period of time.
How
far does real life creep into your work?
What
is ‘real life’ I wonder!
Seriously,
there is so much of real life that happens elsewhere, so much I’m
inevitably cut off from, it’s another reason to be grateful for
poetry. Ilya Kaminsky’s narrative of living in an occupied country
in Deaf Republic and
Jay Bernard’s Surge,
an exploration of the 1981 New Cross fire in south London that killed
13 young black people are just two collections focused on experience
very different from my own. It’s a privilege to be taken into other
worlds like this and it asks something of me. In order to bring them
alive inside myself, I have to be open enough to let the words and
images work on me, I have to meet them with my own humanity.
I’m
talking about the real life in others’ poems, but I guess you’re
really asking do I use my own life events and relationships directly
in my poems? To which there is no unambiguous answer. I sometimes
warn people not to assume, even when I have written a poem in the
first person, that it is necessarily about me. I have a poem in The
Uninvited called A
Serious Word. It’s a sort of
We May Need to Talk About Kevin
poem, but in this case the son
is called Tron. This is a first person monologue, but it’s all pure
fantasy, honest! All my poems are somewhere on the spectrum between
pure fantasy and trying to describe a lived experience as accurately
as possible. An example of the latter might be The
Touch or
After Captain Underpants, the Big Question, both
of which are very faithful to my lived experience from the past.
Of
course, I always want the reader to think that what I’m expressing
is real
life. I am disappointed if I write something that doesn’t seem
‘true’, whether it is or not. I have a whole series of poems
about individual people. Again, some are people I have known, others
completely fictional or with disguises or fictional elements thrown
in. Some I needed to write for myself, but they will never be
published for privacy’s sake, mine or the other person’s.
My
last thoughts are about how very very difficult I find it to write
about some of the big stuff that really matters to me. I’m thinking
about the political state of the UK, the damage caused by years of
austerity and the impact of Brexit. Climate emergency too – where
do you begin? Then there is so much still that needs feminism to keep
speaking loud and clear. I guess this takes us back to ‘real life
creeping in’. What else is there? But sometimes the big stuff
needs to be approached via the seemingly smaller stuff. The personal
truly is political.