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RK : You were born and brought up in Manchester, how do you think it’s shaped your work?
JW: Well I was born in Salford, although not brought up there. My Mothers family are all
Salfordians and to my mind that’s different. What I mean is, I think that Salfordians have certain
characteristics, it’s hard to explain, a sort of flavour of their own, and it’s the way they speak. I
was quite conscious of that, still am.
Most of my family speak like that, though I don’t, I’m much more hybridised. I grew up on the
outskirts of Manchester in a council estate, not that far from Liverpool, the council moved the
whole community there; it was semi- rural, near to Barton Moss. I used to ride my bike up it to
where Stevenson first ran his Rocket; there was a network of drainage ditches, always full of
water of unknown depth. The Moss as we called it, was spongy damp peat and silver birch
growing everywhere. In winter it was like being a kid in a Klimt. But I wasn’t conscious of place
as such as a kid, because I was always imagining I was somewhere else and that’s why I wouldn’t
say I wrote specifically about Manchester.
As an adult I’ve lived all over the place, and when you do that you tend to pick things up, stuff
clings. I’m a digestive sort of person, I tend to absorb then break it all down. I have to risk a bit
of myself when I live somewhere new, it’s like giving a peace offering. I think you enter into a
relationship with a place when you encamp, this means you have to take risks- simple.
RK: That’s interesting; don’t you worry about stepping on someone else’s… geographic
territory? For instance how can you write about say the Lakes after Wordsworth?
JW: I don’t see it like that. This idea of the stake out, metaphorically that is. I mean just because a
person, or poets like Wordsworth or Hughes or Heaney lived in a place, wrote about a place
doesn’t mean they own it or have exclusive rights over it. People, poets, everyone sees things,
experiences life differently – they are more likely to bring startling or different perspectives if
they’re free to write. I don’t believe that something’s untouchable - especially in poetry. In a way
that idea of ground, territory being owned, occupied in the canon by particular writers is a sort of
silent censorship. I’m a free ranger; I‘m not big on enclosure.
RK: You lived in Belfast in the 80’s, that was full of boundaries, demarcations, and full stops –
was that free ranger territory?
JW: I lived in a mixed community and this helped. But yes, you’re always conscious, aware - how
can you not be when you get up in the morning, go to get the milk in and find a couple of
squadies in your front garden pointing SLR rifles at a pensioner, or a woman taking her kids to
school- and it’s all part and parcel of patrol practice. You’re powerless, what can you say- hey
your crushing the plants in the bed! I wouldn’t say it scared me, just shocked me at first, the
erosion of civil liberties. But my husbands Irish and knows the score; there are complex codes,
semiotics in peoples daily interactions in divided communities – like you said multiple boundaries.
Its very difficult to convey what its really like to live in that kind of environment, but its not
unlike the drainage ditches – there is constant danger and you sometimes do and sometimes don’t
know how close it is.
What did scare me was when I realised I was getting used to it. From the house I lived in you
could see the top of the Cave Hill from the upstairs window, it loomed like an island from the
sea, it was like that opening passage of Stevenson’s short story the The Beach Of Falesa something
like … The land breeze blew in our faces, and smelt strong of wild lime and vanilla… it was
somewhere else to go. Now if I was scared, I couldn’t even think of going there. I think its
important to have courage as a poet, sometimes you need to fire a few shots over the canon, to
see if it breaks rank or holds the line, and it’s the same with place; that can also be canonised, be
made saintly.
RK: So what do you think about the way Northern Irish poets have dealt with the ‘Troubles’?
JW: I don’t like calling it that, its too marshmallow, too soft a word, it’s too evasive. Its not for
me to say, they deal with it in their own way- Seamus Heaney refused to write political poetry.
The late James Simmons wrote a shocking elegy, ‘Claudy’, about a terrible explosion in an Ulster
town. I’m not Irish so I come to it from a different perspective, although I don’t think that that
excludes me from writing about it- if I want to I will, you have to get shot of your self
consciousness. I like the poem ‘Smoke’ by Medbh McGuckian; a different way. But to be honest it’
s the novelists writing today, Robert McLiam Wilson, Glenn Patterson that I go back to.
RK: So who are your influences, your poetic forbears?
Not that again! I think its important to say that its not just poets I read, I’ve said this a couple of
times and received criticism for doing so. I’ m not sure why… maybe it’s perceived as not towing
the party line or something… Of course I read other poets! And there are some specific poets,
individual poems I admire and that have affected me; you can see it in my work. But I like
adventure, enjoy ‘cross dressing’ disciplines, using the language of other genres, be it fashion, art,
food, history and so on. A lot of my poems are narrative driven or scenarios.
Take Katherine Mansfield for instance, the short story writer, she did write some poetry. But I
think her best poetry is in the stories themselves, in the psychology she unravels, in the objects-
the props if you like, I like her theatricality. She has a huge handbag. I like poems that can switch,
that are multiple, not just a poem, if you see; they have to have more than one string, they have to
have a set.
The Irish writer, filmmaker Neil Jordan’s good at this too. His collection of short stories
A Night In Tunisia is full of huge possibilities; I like that in poems too. Maybe some people are
scared of that.
RK. A lot of your poems seem not fixed in time or viewpoint. I was thinking of your poem
‘Hat’, you almost get the feeling that what’s being said is not really what’s being thought by
the people in the poem.
JW: It’s the way my mind works. I think this gives an added dimension to the poem, its not a
trick, its real, conscious, and anyway life is like that isn’t it, constantly moving on. Language
moves swiftly, changes tack. Sometimes time overlaps and I’m fascinated by that, especially what
the imagination can do with it.
RK: Many of your poems are multi- sensory explosions…
JW: It’s about the way you relate to the world. I have a dyslexic son, he’s taught me a lot, there’s
not one way of going about things- in a way I’m suspicious of text as the road to all knowledge,
how many people does that exclude? I’m not into illiteracy, don’t get me wrong but sometimes
you can come at words, in a different way, through all the senses- not just exclusively one. For
instance I found song lyrics helped my son learn to read, helped his sequencing and phrasing- we
heard, sang, danced, acted the words out. I believe in combinations, makeup. Poetry is like that
too in the end, it’s the physiology of word not just its skeleton that does it.
JW: Well I was born in Salford, although not brought up there. My Mothers family are all
Salfordians and to my mind that’s different. What I mean is, I think that Salfordians have certain
characteristics, it’s hard to explain, a sort of flavour of their own, and it’s the way they speak. I
was quite conscious of that, still am.
Most of my family speak like that, though I don’t, I’m much more hybridised. I grew up on the
outskirts of Manchester in a council estate, not that far from Liverpool, the council moved the
whole community there; it was semi- rural, near to Barton Moss. I used to ride my bike up it to
where Stevenson first ran his Rocket; there was a network of drainage ditches, always full of
water of unknown depth. The Moss as we called it, was spongy damp peat and silver birch
growing everywhere. In winter it was like being a kid in a Klimt. But I wasn’t conscious of place
as such as a kid, because I was always imagining I was somewhere else and that’s why I wouldn’t
say I wrote specifically about Manchester.
As an adult I’ve lived all over the place, and when you do that you tend to pick things up, stuff
clings. I’m a digestive sort of person, I tend to absorb then break it all down. I have to risk a bit
of myself when I live somewhere new, it’s like giving a peace offering. I think you enter into a
relationship with a place when you encamp, this means you have to take risks- simple.
RK: That’s interesting; don’t you worry about stepping on someone else’s… geographic
territory? For instance how can you write about say the Lakes after Wordsworth?
JW: I don’t see it like that. This idea of the stake out, metaphorically that is. I mean just because a
person, or poets like Wordsworth or Hughes or Heaney lived in a place, wrote about a place
doesn’t mean they own it or have exclusive rights over it. People, poets, everyone sees things,
experiences life differently – they are more likely to bring startling or different perspectives if
they’re free to write. I don’t believe that something’s untouchable - especially in poetry. In a way
that idea of ground, territory being owned, occupied in the canon by particular writers is a sort of
silent censorship. I’m a free ranger; I‘m not big on enclosure.
RK: You lived in Belfast in the 80’s, that was full of boundaries, demarcations, and full stops –
was that free ranger territory?
JW: I lived in a mixed community and this helped. But yes, you’re always conscious, aware - how
can you not be when you get up in the morning, go to get the milk in and find a couple of
squadies in your front garden pointing SLR rifles at a pensioner, or a woman taking her kids to
school- and it’s all part and parcel of patrol practice. You’re powerless, what can you say- hey
your crushing the plants in the bed! I wouldn’t say it scared me, just shocked me at first, the
erosion of civil liberties. But my husbands Irish and knows the score; there are complex codes,
semiotics in peoples daily interactions in divided communities – like you said multiple boundaries.
Its very difficult to convey what its really like to live in that kind of environment, but its not
unlike the drainage ditches – there is constant danger and you sometimes do and sometimes don’t
know how close it is.
What did scare me was when I realised I was getting used to it. From the house I lived in you
could see the top of the Cave Hill from the upstairs window, it loomed like an island from the
sea, it was like that opening passage of Stevenson’s short story the The Beach Of Falesa something
like … The land breeze blew in our faces, and smelt strong of wild lime and vanilla… it was
somewhere else to go. Now if I was scared, I couldn’t even think of going there. I think its
important to have courage as a poet, sometimes you need to fire a few shots over the canon, to
see if it breaks rank or holds the line, and it’s the same with place; that can also be canonised, be
made saintly.
RK: So what do you think about the way Northern Irish poets have dealt with the ‘Troubles’?
JW: I don’t like calling it that, its too marshmallow, too soft a word, it’s too evasive. Its not for
me to say, they deal with it in their own way- Seamus Heaney refused to write political poetry.
The late James Simmons wrote a shocking elegy, ‘Claudy’, about a terrible explosion in an Ulster
town. I’m not Irish so I come to it from a different perspective, although I don’t think that that
excludes me from writing about it- if I want to I will, you have to get shot of your self
consciousness. I like the poem ‘Smoke’ by Medbh McGuckian; a different way. But to be honest it’
s the novelists writing today, Robert McLiam Wilson, Glenn Patterson that I go back to.
RK: So who are your influences, your poetic forbears?
Not that again! I think its important to say that its not just poets I read, I’ve said this a couple of
times and received criticism for doing so. I’ m not sure why… maybe it’s perceived as not towing
the party line or something… Of course I read other poets! And there are some specific poets,
individual poems I admire and that have affected me; you can see it in my work. But I like
adventure, enjoy ‘cross dressing’ disciplines, using the language of other genres, be it fashion, art,
food, history and so on. A lot of my poems are narrative driven or scenarios.
Take Katherine Mansfield for instance, the short story writer, she did write some poetry. But I
think her best poetry is in the stories themselves, in the psychology she unravels, in the objects-
the props if you like, I like her theatricality. She has a huge handbag. I like poems that can switch,
that are multiple, not just a poem, if you see; they have to have more than one string, they have to
have a set.
The Irish writer, filmmaker Neil Jordan’s good at this too. His collection of short stories
A Night In Tunisia is full of huge possibilities; I like that in poems too. Maybe some people are
scared of that.
RK. A lot of your poems seem not fixed in time or viewpoint. I was thinking of your poem
‘Hat’, you almost get the feeling that what’s being said is not really what’s being thought by
the people in the poem.
JW: It’s the way my mind works. I think this gives an added dimension to the poem, its not a
trick, its real, conscious, and anyway life is like that isn’t it, constantly moving on. Language
moves swiftly, changes tack. Sometimes time overlaps and I’m fascinated by that, especially what
the imagination can do with it.
RK: Many of your poems are multi- sensory explosions…
JW: It’s about the way you relate to the world. I have a dyslexic son, he’s taught me a lot, there’s
not one way of going about things- in a way I’m suspicious of text as the road to all knowledge,
how many people does that exclude? I’m not into illiteracy, don’t get me wrong but sometimes
you can come at words, in a different way, through all the senses- not just exclusively one. For
instance I found song lyrics helped my son learn to read, helped his sequencing and phrasing- we
heard, sang, danced, acted the words out. I believe in combinations, makeup. Poetry is like that
too in the end, it’s the physiology of word not just its skeleton that does it.
| Interview |