Do you have a favourite room or conditions to write in?
I do like going away to write. I often go to a writer's retreat called Mount Pleasant in Reigate. It's quite eccentric, but it gives me a clear space, physically and mentally.
For us, we loved ‘How to Walk on a Knife Edge’ from Hare. Do you have a favourite piece you have written?
That's a hard question. 'How to Walk on a Knife Edge' is a favourite of mine too, mainly because I really don't know where it came from. The poems that seem to come out of nowhere are the most intriguing for me.
What tips can you give to writers who feel haunted by the ‘anxiety of influence’?
I think this is just a stage one has to go through. I don't really go along with Harold Bloom's whole thesis. I think one has to be influenced in order to write. Heaney has a wonderful line in an essay called 'Feeling into Words' where he talks about hearing his own future voice in another poet's work. I was very influenced by Ted Hughes when I started writing, and there was a point when I had to find a way of moving beyond that particular voice. But influences are vital
What is your understanding of synaesthesia, and have you ever consciously utilised it as a literary term in your writing?
I think a lot of writing is about using one sense to explain another. Smell is always a hard one to describe, as there are so few words for it. Poetry is so much about getting the language to describe something for which there aren't sufficient words. That's why we have to resort to metaphor. There's a phrase that is often trotted out to demonstrate sentence that doesn't make sense, but which is gramatically correct - 'Colourless green ideas sleep furiously'. But for a poet this is intriguing and perhaps does make some kind of sense.
Have you ever considered the possibility that you may be a ‘synaesthete’? (or ‘synesthete’)
When I was a child, the days of the week had different colours. Monday was red, Tuesday green, Wednesday was blue, Thursday was red, Friday was silver, Saturday was blue and Sunday was yellow.
A Year in Green
by Alex Jones
He woke up in Springtime
Fresh and full of motivation
Ready to face the world's chartreuse
and harlequin combinations
He cartwheeled through the Summer
Lively - bright green.
Energetic and dreaming
Of the things he'd yet to see
He trudged through leaves in Autumn
Envy cast burnt ivy across his mind
As his friends held hands and kissed
Whilst love he could not find
He shivered in Winter's shadows
As blue seeped into his land
Gloomy with resentment he sighed
As the snowflakes died in his hand
Alex Jones is a student living in Wales, UK. He wants to become a published author, and is currently working on his first novel. Alex experiences six different forms of synaesthesia; Emotion - Colour helped him to write his 'A Year In Green' poem.
Have you ever wondered what fashion tastes, smells or sounds like?
Risa Moro has. For her Fashion, Promotion and Imaging Masters course, Risa developed and illustrated a book that explored the forthcoming Spring/Summer 2014 fashion trends using Synaesthesia.
Each page of the book allowed you to touch, taste and smell the trend through a series of visually stimulating images. Each smell, taste, sight and sound was meticulously chosen for their utmost relevance and representation to said trend. For this issue, Risa presents... Amber Earth.