Do you have a favourite space to compose your poetry?
I tend to write as I’m walking, as very often something will catch my eye or spring to mind as I’m on my way somewhere or am just taking a stroll. Walking without purpose is just as important as those precious moments of staring out of the window – it’s in those moments of apparent intellectual downtime that those creative connections happen. I find this is especially true when I’m travelling, and it’s little wonder that I tend to keep poetry diaries of my adventures around the world. So, yes, if ever you spot a person stopped on a footpath hastily scrawling into a notebook or tapping out something into a phone, it may well be me.
How do your poems develop?
I tend to write whole poems at once, with the odd little tweak here or there, so I suppose on one hand they come fairly well formed, but I think that I could equally argue that they’re the result of a good deal of hard work at the subconscious level – my mind has this strange ability to link together the oddest things into patterns, and I suspect that much of my poetry is the end result of this. My poems are basically intellectual and emotional subconscious-feeding carp that have been swimming around in the murkier sections of my mind until at last they collide with each other.
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